What are the prospects for long-run economic growth? The present study looks at a recently launched hypothesis, which I label Singularity. The idea here is that rapid growth in computation and ...

This paper develops the empirical and theoretical case that differences in economic institutions are the fundamental cause of differences in economic development. We first document the empirical ...

We estimate the respective contributions of institutions, geography, and trade in determining income levels around the world, using recently developed instruments for institutions and trade. Our ...

We compare trends in absolute poverty before (1939–1963) and after (1963–2023) the War on Poverty was declared. Our primary methodological contribution is to create a post-tax post-transfer income ...

Population aging is expected to slow U.S. economic growth. We use variation in the predetermined component of population aging across states to estimate the impact of population aging on growth in GDP ...

Using administrative data from Scandinavian countries, we provide evidence on international migration responses to wealth taxes and evaluate their aggregate economic implications. We find significant ...

The "Easterlin paradox" suggests that there is no link between a society's economic development and its average level of happiness. We re-assess this paradox analyzing multiple rich datasets spanning ...

We provide a comprehensive overview of earnings, income and wealth inequality based on the 2022 Survey of Consumer Finances from the United States. We document the current state of inequality and its ...

Benjamin Jones and Josh Lerner, editors. This volume of the Entrepreneurship and Innovation Policy and the Economy series brings rigorous new economic research to bear on a number of current policy ...

We construct a matrix showing the share of the year 2000 population in every country that is descended from people in different source countries in the year 1500. Using this matrix, we analyze how ...

Unlike most cross-country growth analyses, we focus on turning points in growth performance. We look for instances of rapid acceleration in economic growth that are sustained for at least eight years ...

This paper combines income tax returns with Flow of Funds data to estimate the distribution of household wealth in the United States since 1913. We estimate wealth by capitalizing the incomes reported ...