Welchen Einfluß haben Religionen auf die wirtschaftliche Entwicklung? oder: Macht Glauben reicher? Dieser Frage wurde in einer Veröffentlichung der Wirtschaftswoche (Wiwo, 29.5.1997, S. 34-39) nachgegangen, die anhand einer empirischen Erhebung Aussagen über die Religionszugehörigkeit von...

“Light” welfare states were perceived by some as one source of East Asian economicdynamism. Didier Jacobs has examined the strengths of several East Asian socialwelfare systems and the challenges they face after the financial crisis.Japan has a fully-fledged social welfare system. Yet her...

This Report is about Reforming pensions in China, Chile and elsewhere.

This bold, imaginative book advances an entirely new theory of voters’ behavior.The starting point for this theory is that individuals are endowed with a set of beliefs, ora worldview, and derive psychological benefits from acting in accordance with these beliefs.However, the beliefs of most...

This paper develops a simple model to analyze how a lack of politi-cal competition may lead to policies that hinder economic growth. Wetest the predictions of the model on panel data for the US states. Inthese data, we …nd robust evidence that lack of political competitionin a state is...

The British industrial revolution created an industrial economy. While casual discourse conflates industrialization and economic growth, Britain was remarkable primarily for the pronounced structural change that occurred rather than for rapid economic growth. Uniquely the British labour force...

The “Golden Age” of post-war European economic growth has witnessedextraordinary changes not only in the economic, but also in the social andcultural outlook of Western European societies. Eric Hobsbawm’s statementthat “[h]istorians of the twentieth century in the third millennium will...

A significant but uneven spurt of industrialization started in China during the first three decades of the 20th century at a time of political instability and national disintegration. This article argues that economic growth during this period was closely associated with the rise and expansion...

In early modern north-western Europe, real wages declined while GDP per capita was on the increase. In contrast, wage growth in Tokugawa Japan went hand in hand with output growth. Based on this finding, the paper revisits Thomas Smith’s thesis on ‘Pre-modern Economic Growth: Japan and the...

This paper revisits the issue of the productivity performance of pre-World War I Britain’s railway system with an improved dataset and with modern time-series econometrics. We find a slowdown in TFP growth between 1850 and 1870, after which it stabilized at about 1.1%. An analysis of...