This study uses a unique natural experiment to test a simple model of international differences in workers' wages and productivity. Large differences in wages across countries could arise from several sources. These include barriers to trade in outputs, differences in technology, differences in...

A question that continues to puzzle development economists is why, despite tremendous efforts to the contrary, we do not see a consistent pattern of wealth convergence between the developed and developing worlds. Drawing upon the post-Apartheid experience of South Africa in which black South...

Concern has intensified in recent years that many instrumental variables used in widely-cited growth regressions may be invalid, weak, or both. Attempts to remedy this general problem remain inadequate. We demonstrate that a range of published growth regressions may contain spurious results...

The international goal for rich countries to devote 0.7% of their national income to development assistance has become a cause celebre for aid activists and has been accepted in many official quarters as the legitimate target for aid budgets. The origins of the target, however, raise serious...

Past research on aid and growth is flawed because it typically examines the impact of aggregate aid on growth over a short period, usually four years, while significant portions of aid are unlikely to affect growth in such a brief time. We divide aid into three categories: (1) emergency and...

Raising school enrollment, like economic development in general, takes a long time. This is partly because, as a mountain of empirical evidence now shows, economic conditions and slowly-changing parental education levels determine children's school enrollment to a greater degree than education...

Global private capital flows have barely touched the poorest nations; the rich invest mostly with the rich. Confronted with this wealth bias in cross-border investment flows, one of the starkest facts of the global economy, theorists and empiricists have spent roughly the last decade looking for...

Despite an enormous literature that has analyzed the comparative experiences of Latin America and Asia in post-World War II trade policy, almost no attention has been paid to the comparative experience prior to the wars. Even a cursory look at the best available empirical evidence reveals...

This paper uses a new database to establish a key finding: high tariffs were associated with fast growth before World War II, while associated with slow growth thereafter. The paper offers some explanations for the sign switch by controlling for novel measures of the changing world economic...

This paper uses a new database to establish two findings covering the first globalization boom before World War I, the second since World War II, and the autarkic interlude in between. First, there is strong evidence supporting a Tariff-Growth Paradox: protection was associated with fast growth...