Developed societies = happy societies? Growth or development - BRIC

Development Communication for Developing Societies

Institutions and growth in limited access societies

We build a dynamic political economy model with a two-class society: workers and the elite. In the model, the formation of the elite, the rate of innovation and …scal policy are endogenous. We focus on the con‡ict within the elite over two fundamental engines of economic growth: innovation and public investment. The model creates a mapping between institutions and economic outcomes which is con...

How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed

Collapse: how societies choose to fail or succeed/Jared Diamond. p. cm. Includes index.

Simulating Information Growth & Diffusion in Agent Societies

The question of how to simultaneously promote growth and diffusion of ideas exhibits difficult yet pressing tradeoffs. To economists, it concerns the relationship between economic health and incentives for sharing information. When does the stimulus to innovation, founded on a profit motive, collide with access to information source material, which exhibits properties of a public good? To the l...

Growth, inequality and taxation in uncommitted societies

This paper considers the properties and implementation of optimal allocations in settings with private information, but without societal commitment. The environment features a continuum of infinitely-lived agents who exert costly effort that is combined with capital to produce output. These agents receive private shocks to their disutility of effort. They are motivated to truthfully reveal thei...