This paper estimates production functions of child cognitive and social development using a panel data of nine-year old children each with over two hundred home and school inputs as well as family background variables. A tree regression method is used to conduct estimation under various...

This paper studies the transition of contract enforcement institutions. The preva- lence of relational contracts, low legal quality, strong cultural preference for personalistic relationships, low social mobility, and highly unequal endowment form a cluster of mutually reinforcing institutions...

This paper establishes a simple model of long run economic and political development, which is driven by the inherent technical features of dierent production factors and the political con.icts among factor owners on how to divide the outputs. The main production factor in economy evolves from...

This paper studies the transition of contract enforcement institutions. The prevalence of relational contracts, low legal quality, strong cultural preference for personalistic relationships, low social mobility, and highly unequal endowment form a cluster of mutually reinforcing institutions...

This paper establishes a simple model of long run economic and political development, which is driven by the inherent technical features of dierent production factors, and political conicts among factor owners on how to divide the outputs. The main capital form in economy evolves from land to...

This paper develops a new international monetary framework for analysing the domestic and international repercussions of China’s exchange rate policy in the context of its rapid development. This straightforward framework reveals that misalignment of the yuan against major currencies...

We study the connection between economic performance and the quality of government institutions for the sample of 103 Italian NUTS3 regions, including new measures of institutional quality calculated using data on the provision of four areas of public service: health, educational...

We advance the hypothesis that cultural values such as high work ethics and thrift, “the Protestant ethic” according to Max Weber, may have been diffused long before the Reformation, thereby importantly affecting the pre-industrial growth record. The source of pre-Reformation Protestant...

We use the largest common factor in 14 items reported in the World Values Surveys as a robust measure of religiosity. This measure is held to identify the importance of religion in all aspects of people's life. The level of religiosity differs by about 50 percentage points between rich and poor...

This paper contributes to trade diversification literature by comparing changes in relative (i.e. assessed in comparison with world patterns) heterogeneity of import and export structures in the process of economic development. In particular, by focusing on the diversification of imports, we add...