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...

The agricultural transition, the demographic transition and the democratic transition explain the development paths of the share of agriculture, the population growth rate, and the standard democracy indices. We demonstrate that two related estimation models give contradictory results when...

We show that the specification of technology differences in recent empirical studies of trade is not supported by basic growth theory and may lead to biased estimates of the pattern of specialization and trade.

The Grand Transition (GT) view claims that economic development is causal to institutional development, and that many institutional changes can be understood as transitions occurring at roughly the same level (zones) of development. The Primacy of Institutions (PoI) view claims that economic...

Translated to a cross-country context, the Solow model (Solow 1956) would predict that international differences in steady state output per person are due to international differences in technology such that the capital output ratio is constant for international differences in steady state...

We reconsider the effects of long run growth on relative factor prices across cones of specialization. We model economic growth as exogenous technological change. Allowing for capital biased technological change with a sector bias and for endogenous commodity prices, we find that economic growth...