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Macroeconomic theories of growth and wealth distribution have an outsized influence on national and international social and economic policies. Yet, due to a relative lack of reliable, system wide data, many such theories remain, at best,…
As countries develop, the relative importance of agriculture declines and economic activity becomes spatially concentrated. We develop a model integrating structural change and regional disparities to jointly capture these phenomena. A key…
This paper proposes a two blocks and three regions economic geography model that can account for the most salient stylized facts experienced by Eastern European transition economies during the period 1990 2005. In contrast to the existing…
Essential to each other, growth and exploration are jointly observed in populations, be it alive such as animals and cells or inanimate such as goods and money. But their ability to move, crucial to cope with uncertainty and optimize…
Spatial distribution of the human population is distinctly heterogeneous, e.g. showing significant difference in the population density between urban and rural areas. In the historical perspective, i.e. on the timescale of centuries, the…
In the pursuit of ever increasing efficiency and growth, our economies have evolved to remarkable degrees of complexity, with nested production processes feeding each other in order to create products of greater sophistication from less…
We investigate the exploration of rugged fitness landscapes by spatially structured populations with demes on the nodes of a graph, connected by migrations. In the rare migration regime, we find that finite structures can adapt more…
This paper presents a physical perspective on the human migration phenomenon claiming that human social behaviors are somehow but not completely inspired by nature. Human displacement or migration in the world is highly affected by…
The twentieth century was a period of outstanding economic growth together with an unequal income distribution. This paper analyses the international distribution of growth rates and its dynamics during the twentieth century. We show that…
We investigate how protectionist policies influence economic growth. Our empirical strategy exploits an extraordinary tax scandal that gave rise to an unexpected change of government in Sweden. A free-trade majority in parliament was…
Previous studies show that natural disasters decelerate economic growth, and more so in countries with lower financial development. We confirm these results with more recent data. We are the first to show that fiscal stability reduces the…
As is well known, during the Last Glacial Maximum, about 20'000 years ago, the ice was asymmetrically distributed around the present North Pole. It reached the region of New York, while east Siberia remained ice free. Mammoths lived in…
The most profound change in the relationship between humans and their environment was the introduction of agriculture and pastoralism. [....] For an understanding of the expansion process, it appears appropriate to apply a diffusive model.…
I propose a new conceptual framework to disentangle the impacts of weather and climate on economic activity and growth: A stochastic frontier model with climate in the production frontier and weather shocks as a source of inefficiency. I…
We consider an economic geography model with two inter-regional proximity structures: one governing goods trade and the other governing production externalities across regions. We investigate how the introduction of the latter affects the…
Geography, including climatic factors, have long been considered potentially important elements in shaping socio-economic activities, alongside other determinants, such as institutions. Here we demonstrate that geography and climate…
We investigate the relation between economic growth and equality in a modified version of the agent-based asset exchange model (AEM). The modified model is a driven system that for a range of parameter space is effectively ergodic in the…
Is a causal description of human wealth history conceivable? To investigate the matter we introduce a simple causal albeit strongly aggregated model, assuming that the observed wealth growth is mainly driven by human collaborative efforts…
Contrary to common belief, both the Earth's human population and its economic output have grown faster than exponential, i.e., in a super-Malthusian mode, for most of the known history. These growth rates are compatible with a spontaneous…
This study re-examines the impact of natural disasters on economic growth in the perspective of developed and developing countries. Based on panel data consisting of developing and developed countries over the period 1990-2019 and using…