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422
Corporate Governance, Economic Entrenchment and Growth
- Journal of Economic Literature. Forthcoming
, 2004
"... Outside the U.S. and the U.K., large corporations usually have controlling owners, who are usually very wealthy families. Pyramidal control structures, cross shareholding and super-voting rights let such families control corporations without making a commensurate capital investment. In many countrie ..."
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Cited by 178 (24 self)
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Outside the U.S. and the U.K., large corporations usually have controlling owners, who are usually very wealthy families. Pyramidal control structures, cross shareholding and super-voting rights let such families control corporations without making a commensurate capital investment. In many countries, a few such families end up controlling considerable proportions of their countries ’ economies. Three points emerge. First, at the firm level, these ownership structures, because they vest dominant control rights with families who often have little real capital invested, permit a range of agency problems and hence resource misallocation. If a few families control large swaths of an economy, such corporate governance problems can attain macroeconomic importance – affecting rates of innovation, economy-wide resource allocation, and economic growth. If political influence depends on what one controls, rather than what one owns, the controlling owners of pyramids have greatly amplified political influence relative to
PEPG/07-04 Was Weber Wrong? A Human Capital Theory of Protestant Economic History *
"... Max Weber attributed the higher economic prosperity of Protestant regions to a Protestant work ethic. We provide an alternative theory, where Protestant economies prospered because instruction in reading the Bible generated the human capital crucial to economic prosperity. County-level data from lat ..."
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Cited by 101 (10 self)
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Max Weber attributed the higher economic prosperity of Protestant regions to a Protestant work ethic. We provide an alternative theory, where Protestant economies prospered because instruction in reading the Bible generated the human capital crucial to economic prosperity. County-level data from late 19 th-century Prussia reveal that Protestantism was indeed associated not only with higher economic prosperity, but also with better education. We find that Protestants ’ higher literacy can account for the whole gap in economic prosperity. Results hold when we exploit the initial concentric dispersion of the Reformation to use distance to Wittenberg as an instrument for Protestantism.
Poverty Traps
- Prepared for the Handbook of Economic Growth
"... In the problem of economic development, a phrase that crops up frequently is ‘the vicious circle of poverty.’ It is generally treated as something obvious, too obvious to be worth examining. I hope I may be forgiven if I begin by taking a look at this obvious concept. (R. Nurkse, 1953) ..."
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Cited by 94 (3 self)
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In the problem of economic development, a phrase that crops up frequently is ‘the vicious circle of poverty.’ It is generally treated as something obvious, too obvious to be worth examining. I hope I may be forgiven if I begin by taking a look at this obvious concept. (R. Nurkse, 1953)
The Knowledge Spillover Theory of Entrepreneurship, Center for Economic Policy Research
- The Annals of Regional Science
, 2005
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Do Additional National Patent Laws Stimulate Domestic Innovation in an International Patenting Environment?” Harvard working paper, http://kuznets.fas.harvard.edu/yiqian/patent.pdf
, 2004
"... Abstract—This paper evaluates the effects of patent protection on phar-maceutical innovations for 26 countries that established pharmaceutical patent laws during 1978–2002. Controlling for country characteristics through matched sampling techniques to establish two proper comparison sets among 92 sa ..."
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Cited by 64 (6 self)
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Abstract—This paper evaluates the effects of patent protection on phar-maceutical innovations for 26 countries that established pharmaceutical patent laws during 1978–2002. Controlling for country characteristics through matched sampling techniques to establish two proper comparison sets among 92 sampled countries and through country-pair fixed-effects regressions, this study yields robust results. National patent protection alone does not stimulate domestic innovation, as estimated by changes in citation-weighted U.S. patent awards, domestic R&D, and pharmaceutical industry exports. However, domestic innovation accelerates in countries with higher levels of economic development, educational attainment, and economic freedom. Additionally, there appears to be an optimal level of intellectual property rights regulation above which further enhancement reduces innovative activities. I.
Does Capital Account Liberalization Lead to Growth
- Georgetown University
, 2006
"... We test whether capital account liberalization led to higher economic growth using de jure measures of capital account and financial current account openness for 94 nations, from 1950 (or independence) onward. We argue that measurement error, differing time periods used, and collinearity among indep ..."
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Cited by 52 (1 self)
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We test whether capital account liberalization led to higher economic growth using de jure measures of capital account and financial current account openness for 94 nations, from 1950 (or independence) onward. We argue that measurement error, differing time periods used, and collinearity among independent variables account for conflicting results in prior scholarship. We use pooled time-series, cross-sectional OLS and system GMM estimators to examine economic growth rates, 1955–2004. Capital account liberalization had a positive association with growth in both developed and emerging market nations. We confirm that equity market liberalization has an independent effect on economic growth. (JEL F02, F43, P16) In this paper, we reexamine the effects of capital account liberalization on economic growth in the context of addressing the inconsistent and widely diverging results that have been reported in the scholarly literature over the last decade. (See the comprehensive review essays on the topic by Eichengreen, 2001 and Kose et al., 2006; henceforth KPRW.) We strive to untangle the reasons behind this inconsistency, and to situate our results in the broader
of LaborThe “Out of Africa ” Hypothesis, Human Genetic Diversity, and Comparative Economic Development
, 2012
"... Any opinions expressed here are those of the author(s) and not those of IZA. Research published in this series may include views on policy, but the institute itself takes no institutional policy positions. The Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA) in Bonn is a local and virtual international resear ..."
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Cited by 45 (9 self)
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Any opinions expressed here are those of the author(s) and not those of IZA. Research published in this series may include views on policy, but the institute itself takes no institutional policy positions. The Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA) in Bonn is a local and virtual international research center and a place of communication between science, politics and business. IZA is an independent nonprofit organization supported by Deutsche Post Foundation. The center is associated with the University of Bonn and offers a stimulating research environment through its international network, workshops and conferences, data service, project support, research visits and doctoral program. IZA engages in (i) original and internationally competitive research in all fields of labor economics, (ii) development of policy concepts, and (iii) dissemination of research results and concepts to the interested public. IZA Discussion Papers often represent preliminary work and are circulated to encourage discussion. Citation of such a paper should account for its provisional character. A revised version may be
Financial development and openness: Evidence from panel data
- Journal of Development Economics
, 2009
"... Part of the Economics Commons This Working Paper is brought to you for free and open access by the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs at SURFACE. It has been accepted for inclusion in Center for Policy Research by an authorized administrator of SURFACE. For more information, please con ..."
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Cited by 38 (3 self)
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Part of the Economics Commons This Working Paper is brought to you for free and open access by the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs at SURFACE. It has been accepted for inclusion in Center for Policy Research by an authorized administrator of SURFACE. For more information, please contact
What Drives International Financial Flows? Politics, Institutions and Other Determinants
- Journal of Development Economics
, 2009
"... This paper uses a large panel of financial flow data from banks to assess how institutions affect international lending. First, employing a time varying composite institutional quality index in a fixed-effects framework, the paper shows that institutional improvements are followed by significant inc ..."
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Cited by 33 (2 self)
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This paper uses a large panel of financial flow data from banks to assess how institutions affect international lending. First, employing a time varying composite institutional quality index in a fixed-effects framework, the paper shows that institutional improvements are followed by significant increases in international finance. Second, cross-sectional models also show a strong effect of initial levels of institutional quality on future bank lending. Third, instrumental variable estimates suggest that the historically predetermined component of institutional development is also a significant correlate of international bank inflows. These results thus suggest that institutional underdeveloped can explain a significant part of Lucas (1990) paradox of why doesn’t capital flow from rich to poor countries. The analysis also does a first-step towards understanding which exactly institutional features affect international banking.
