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Working Paper
Factor returns, institutions, and geography: a view from trade
The authors show that estimated productivities of labor and capital, which rationalize trade flows across countries, are related to total factor productivities, which rationalize output differences across countries. They present evidence that these productivities from trade are related to the institutions and geography across countries. Protection of property rights is the dominant influence on both labor and capital productivity, with geography less important and democracy even less important. The authors also present preliminary evidence that protection of property rights has similar ...
Working Paper
Human capital and economic development
This paper develops a general equilibrium model of fertility and human capital investment under uncertainty. Uncertainty exists in the form of a probability that a young adult does not survive to old age. Parents maximize expected utility arising from own consumption, their fertility, and the discounted utility of future generations. There exists a precautionary demand for children. Young adult mortality is negatively related to the average human capital of young adults. Therefore, rising human capital leads to falling mortality, which eventually induces a demographic transition and an ...
Working Paper
How important are capital and total factor productivity for economic growth?
The authors examine the relative importance of the growth of physical and human capital and the growth of total factor productivity (TFP) using newly organized data on 145 countries that span more than one hundred years for twenty-four of these countries. For all countries, only 3 percent of average output growth per worker is associated with TFP growth. This world average masks interesting variations across countries and regions. Of the nine regions, TFP growth accounts for about twenty percent of average output growth in three regions and between ten and zero percent in the other three ...
Working Paper
Income and education of the states of the United States: 1840–2000
This article introduces original annual average years of schooling measures for each state from 1840 to 2000. The paper also combines original data on real state per-worker output with existing data to provide a more comprehensive series of real state output per worker from 1840 to 2000. These data show that the New England, Middle Atlantic, Pacific, East North Central, and West North Central regions have been educational leaders during the entire time period. In contrast, the South Atlantic, East South Central, and West South Central regions have been educational laggards. The Mountain ...
Working Paper
Does opening a stock exchange increase economic growth?
We examine the connection between the creation of stock exchanges and economic growth with a new set of data on economic growth that spans a longer time period than generally available. We find that economic growth increases relative to the rest of the world after a stock exchange opens. Our evidence indicates that increased growth of productivity is the primary way that a stock exchange increases the growth rate of output, rather than an increase in the growth rate of physical capital. We also find that financial deepening is rapid before the creation of a stock exchange and slower ...
Journal Article
Modern economic growth and recent stagnation
During the past 200 years, most countries have entered a period of modern economic growth-consistent increases in output, input, and productivity per worker that were rare in previous centuries. Even so, a few regions of the world have experienced stagnant or falling living standards in recent years, which some have interpreted as typical of modern economic growth in the last two centuries. ; Using data for most countries in the world since the 1800s and early 1900s, the authors find that (1) economic growth has improved the lives of people all around the world compared to those of their ...
Working Paper
Human capital and economic development
This paper reports the results of experiments designed to examine whether a taste for fairness affects people?s preferred tax structure. Building on the Fehr and Schmidt (1999) model, we devise a simple test for the presence of social preferences in voting for alternative tax structures. The experimental results show that individuals demonstrate concern for their own payoff and inequality aversion in choosing among alternative tax structures. However, concern for redistribution decreases when it leads to increasing deadweight losses. Our findings have important implications for the design of ...