This paper contributes to the literature comparing the relative performance of financial intermediaries and markets by studying an environment in which a trade-off between risk sharing and growth arises endogenously. Financial intermediaries provide insurance to households against a liquidity...

In this paper I argue that most comparisons of the unemployment dynamics in the United States and Europe since the war incorrectly neglect the role of technological catch-up in Europe up to the late 1960s and the contribution of the different growth experiences in the two continents. Growth has...

We present a model in which capital assets can only be owned by members of a small politically-connected elite ("the oligarchs"), each member of which faces a given risk of being expropriated, and we investigate the implications of such an imperfection of property rights for the transition to a...

Analyzing a variety of cross-national and sub-national data sources, we show that high adult mortality reduces economic growth by shortening time horizons. Higher adult mortality is associated with increased levels of risky behavior, higher fertility and lower investment in physical and human...

Even though recent evidence suggests that productivity differences between countries account for the bulk of cross-country differences in per capita income levels and that a large part of these productivity differences are due to countries using different technologies, there is no formal...

A recent literature in development economics has focused renewed attention on land redistribution. Driven in part by political events in countries like Zimbabwe, the literature has sought to understand the economic implications of land reform. Much of this literature focuses on credit market...

The purpose of the paper is to study the effects of labor market policies on the equilibrium rate of growth in the Grossman-Helpman model. For that purpose, the version of the their model developed by Klette and Kortum to explain the distribution of firm size is extended to allow for both...

The path of economic development for rich industrialized countries is typically to transit from farming to manufacturing to services. To do so requires corresponding productivity gains to pull the economy from one sector to the next one. For example, the US and Japan developed their...

Recent growth papers have utilized the Ben-Porath 1967 mechanism according to which prolonging the period in which individuals may receive returns on their investment spurs investment in human capital and cause growth. Implicitly, one implication of these models is that total labor input over...

This paper analyzes optimal foreign aid policy in a neoclassical framework with a conflict of interest between the donor and the recipient government. Aid conditionality is modelled as a limited enforceable contract. We define conditional aid policy to be self-enforcing if, at any point in time,...