This paper analyzes a heterogeneous-agents endogenous-growth model incorporating both transaction costs and social capital. An individual can either become an active part of the society?s middle-class networks of trust and mutual cooperation, thus making a positive contribution to overall social...

The issue of poverty traps is assessed using quantile regression. For that an augmentation of the usual convergence regressions by quadratic and cubic terms is used with emphasis on curve fitting rather than parameter estimation. The results show that the generic mechanism leading to poverty...

Max Weber attributed the higher economic prosperity of Protestant regions to a Protestant work ethic. We provide an alternative theory, where Protestant economies prospered because instruction in reading the Bible generated the human capital crucial to economic prosperity. County-level data from...

There is a well-known debate about the roles of geography versus institutions in explaining the long-term development of countries. These debates have usually been based on cross-country regressions where questions about parameter heterogeneity, unobserved heterogeneity, and endogeneity cannot...

Large and sustained differences in marginal products of capital (MPKs) across countries are sharply at odds with the core implications of the neoclassical framework. Lucas (1990) and many subsequent studies have examined reasons for this MPK differential. In a recent contribution, Caselli and...

Interest in biofuels is growing worldwide as concerns about the security of energy supply and climate change are moving into the focus of policy makers. With the exception of bioethanol from Brazil, however, production costs of biofuels are typically much higher than those of fossil fuels.As a...

In many developing countries, the formal financial sector is underdeveloped and majority of the population does not have access to it. This paper analyzes the empirical link between remittances and financial sector development on a microeconomic level. Using a unique household dataset for...

Successful economic development is usually characterized by two salient phenomena: industrialization and demographic transition. Chronologically both events happen so closely to each other that historians and economists alike suspect that they are interrelated. This paper develops a theory for...

We examine the impact of financial development on earnings inequality in Brazil in the 1980s and first half of the 1990s. The evidence- based on panel-time series data and analysis-shows that financial development had a significant and robust effect in reducing inequality during the period. We...

We examine the impact of inflation on financial development in Brazil and the data available permit us to cover the period between 1985 and 2002. The results-based initially on time-series and then on panel time-series data and analysis, and robust for different estimators and financial...