Doctor of Philosophy

This paper uses a pooled mean group (PMG) estimator to evaluate the effects of tax policy on state-level growth. We find that property and sales tax rates have negative effects on long-run income growth, while income tax rates have no impact.

Recent empirical studies on agricultural productivity growth in African countries have produced mixed results; some find that uptake of new technology (technical progress) is the main source of total factor productivity growth while others point to improved use of existing technology (efficiency...