We examine human capital's contribution to economy-wide technological progress through two channels -- imitation and innovation -- innovation being more skilled-intensive than innovation. We develop a growth model considering an endogenous ability-driven skill acquisition decision of an...

We examine human capital's contribution to economy-wide technological progress through two channels -- imitation and innovation -- innovation being more skilled-intensive than innovation. We develop a growth model considering an endogenous ability-driven skill acquisition decision of an...

Economists have a long argue that political process such as democracy and corruption are important for economic growth. Our objective in this paper is to demonstrate that one of democracy's indirect posititive effects is its ability to mitigate the negative effect of corruption on economic...

The concept of club convergence has been widely used in empirical analysis to group countries in clubs with similar development paths. However, there is no unified agreement on how to identify the clubs in the first place. In this paper, I argue that economic history can guide us to identify...

We use US county level data (3,058 observations) from 1970 to 1998 to explore the relationship between economic growth and the extent of government employment at three levels: federal, state and local. We find that increases in federal, state and local government employments are all negatively...

We use new US county level data (3,058 observations) from 1970 to 1998 to explore the relationship between economic growth and the size of government at three levels: federal, state and local. Using 3SLS-IV estimation we find that the size of federal, state and local government all either...

This paper analyzes the role of entrepreneurship capital as a new explanatory factor of Spanish Labor Productivity of Economic Sectors. Based on the Audretsch and Keilbach’s Model (2004a) that measure the capacity of generating new enterprises, the methodology incorporates this capacity as a...

We use US county-level data containing 3,058 cross-sectional observations and 41 conditioning variables to study economic growth and explore possible heterogeneity in growth determination across 32 individual states. Using a 3SLS-IV estimation method, we find that the convergence rates for 32...

Higgins et al. (2006) report several statistically significant partial correlates with U.S. per capita income growth. However, Levine and Renelt (1992) demonstrate that such correlations are hardly ever robust to changing the combination of conditioning variables included. We ask whether the...