Using newly collected national and sub-national data and historical case studies, this paper argues that differences in innovative capacity, captured by the density of engineers at the dawn of the Second Industrial Revolution, are important to explaining present income differences, and, in...

In an influential paper Mankiw, Romer, and Weil (1992) argue that the evidence on the international disparity in levels of per capita income and rates of growth is consistent with a standard Solow model, once it has been augmented to include human capital as an accumulable factor. In a study on...

Is human capital a robust predictor of good institutions? Using a new institutional quality measure, the International Property Rights Index (IPRI), we find that cognitive skill measures are significant, robust, and large in magnitude. We use two databases of cognitive skills: estimates of...

We examine the importance of total factor productivity (TFP) growth in middle-income countries based on cross-country panel data for the period 1975-2014. We find that TFP growth contributed significantly to a country’s upward transition from middle-income to high-income country group. The TFP...

Parental human capital and endowments may affect children's human capital, which in turn may affect children's earning and occupations and thus affect social mobility. This paper focuses on what we know about these possible links in low- and middle-income countries. It starts with definitions of...

Productive consumption enables the satisfaction of current needs and, at the same time, increases the productive potential of labour. Theoretical as well as empirical evidence suggests that productive consumption is primarily relevant to low-income countries. From the perspective of growth...