This paper introduces a new comprehensive panel of annual state-level income inequality measures spanning the postwar period 1945–2004. For many states, the share of income held by the top decile experienced a prolonged period of stability after World War II, followed by a substantial increase in inequality during the 1980s and 1990s. This paper also presents an examination of the long-run rela...

This paper uses newly available long-span data on real per capita incomes from 1900-2001 to test for stochastic convergence in a diverse group of 29 countries. To perform our tests, we utilize the two-break LM unit root test of Lee and Strazicich (2003) and endogenously determine two distinct structural breaks in level and trend for each country. Despite including both OECD and non-OECD countri...

Rising educational attainment and research intensity in recent decades suggest that the U.S. economy is far from its steady state. This paper develops a model reconciling these facts with the stability of U.S. growth rates. In the model, long-run growth arises from the worldwide discovery of ideas, which depends on population growth. Nevertheless, constant growth can temporarily proceed at a fa...

In this paper, we improve upon Coe and Helpman’s model of international R&D spillovers, using seemingly unrelated regression (SUR) to include interdependence among national economies and allow for variations in coefficients across countries. We find that the impact of knowledge spillovers on national productivity is context dependent: positive in some cases while negative in others. From our in...

We investigate the impact of different privatisation methods on economic growth in transition economies. A growth equation is estimated on annual data for 23 countries during the period 1990-2001. GDP growth is found to be positively related to employment, capital and human capital growth, as well as private sector and capital market development. It is found that mass privatisation has a signif...

This paper argues that accounting for the dynamic interactions between endogenous changes in longevity, the education composition of the population, and the associated fertility differential is crucial for understanding the economic and the demographic transition. In the model, heterogeneous individuals make optimal decisions about fertility, education of their children and type and intensity o...

We construct a Schumpeterian growth model of a common market with following properties. Households can stay as workers or become researchers at some cost. Workers are employed in production and researchers in R&D. Workers are unionized. Intermediate goods are substitutes and their producers are strategically interdependent. The main findings are as follows. Both union power and economic integra...

The budgetary implications of an aging population in the OECD are often considered dire. This study argues that this need not be the case provided that older educated workers are more innovative than their younger counterparts, and that workers with tertiary education stay in the labor force until their 60s. Using a panel of 21 OECD countries over the period 1870-2009, this paper estimates the ...

In this paper we examine whether nonlinearities in the aggregate production function can explain parameter heterogeneity in the Solow (1956) growth regressions. Nonlinearities in the production technology are introduced by replacing the linear Cobb-Douglas specification with the more general CES specification. We justify our choice of production function by showing that in the context of cross-...

We present a version of the neoclassical model with an endogenous industry structure. We obtain multiple steady-state equilibria with an arbitrarily small degree of increasing returns to scale. While the most productive …rms operate across all the steady states, in a poverty trap less productive …rms operate as well. This results in lower average …rm productivity and total factor productivity. ...