What accounts for economic growth and prosperity? What stands at their origin? Recent literature typically searches for single univariate causal explanations: institutions, culture, human capital, geography. In this paper we provide instead a first theoretical modeling of the interaction between different possible explanations for growth and prosperity (in particular, between culture and instit...

Promoting rural wealth creation in the United States is a high priority of the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) and of a growing number of rural development organizations. Secretary Vilsack argued in 2009 that USDA “must help rural communities create wealth so they are self-sustaining, repopulating and thriving economically”, and this is one of the four goals of USDA’s current strategic pl...

We generalize a trade model with firm-specific heterogeneity and R&D-based growth to allow for an endogenous education decision of households and an endogenously evolving population. Our framework is able to explain cross-country differences in living standards and trade intensities by the differential pace of human capital accumulation among industrialized countries. Consistent with the empiri...

Published in the Review of Radical Political Economics, December 1997 THE RATE OF PROFIT AND THE FUTURE OF CAPITALISM According to Marxian theory, the performance of capitalist economies depends above all else on the rate of profit. When the rate of profit is high, capitalism is relatively prosperous: business investment is high, unemployment is relatively low, and the living standards of worke...

This article asks if and under what conditions ethnic diversity could become a foundation for a prosperous society. Recent studies on ethnic diversity and social cohesion suggest that diversity has a negative effect on social cohesion and therefore is detrimental to the social prosperity of individuals and communities. This paper argues that although such a negative correlation may apply to con...

Ludwig von Mises established the foundations of modem Austrian economics while Irving Fisher established the foundations of modem mainstream macroeconomics and central bank policy. Fisher helped create and was a proponent of mathematical economics, statistics and index numbers, and a monetary policy that I "stabilized" the value of the dollar. Fisher claimed that his scientific approach t estab...

M any people now enjoy levels of prosperity that would have been barely imaginable a few hundred years ago. That remarkable achievement can be viewed through the lens of productivity statistics that give quantitative estimates of output per unit of input. By studying productivity, analysts can improve their understanding of the causes of national prosperity and economic growth. Since different ...