Culture, Institutions and the Wealth of Nations We construct an endogenous growth model that includes a cultural variable along the dimension of individualism-collectivism. The model predicts that more individualism leads to more innovation because of the social rewards associated with innovation in an individualist culture. This cultural effect may offset the negative effects of bad institutio...

As is well known, the deterministic version of the maximum principle allows us to state rigorously the relationship between deterministic income (essentially the Hamiltonian) and deterministic wealth (essentially the state evaluation function). As a background motivating point of departure, consider the simple story of an infinitely long-lived individual whose sole wealth consists of a bank dep...

We explore a simple game-theoretical betting model where players’ bets influence the outcome of a probabilistic game. We find that the dynamics and equilibrium results for these games are quite simple, but the transitory distribution of wealth is interesting. Most econophysics models of wealth distribution use random exchanges. In our model, in contrast, skill accounts for a majority of the wea...

We construct an endogenous growth model that includes a cultural variable along the dimension of individualism-collectivism. The model predicts that more individualism leads to more innovation because of the social rewards associated with innovation in an individualist culture. This cultural effect may offset the negative effects of bad institutions on growth. Collectivism leads to efficiency g...

This paper re-explores the relation between a country’s level of wealth and the mix of products it exports. We argue that both are simultaneously determined by countries’ capabilities i.e. by countries’ productivity and quality levels for each good. Our theoretical setup has two features. (1) Some goods have fewer high-quality producers/countries than others i.e. there is Ricardian comparative ...

Why do some dynasties maintain the fortune of their founders while others completely squander it in few generations? To address this question, we use a simple deterministic microfounded model based on two main elements: the “hunger for accumulation” and the “willingness to exert effort”. Contrary to models with capital market imperfections, our setting points to the crucial role of our two key ...