Three Essays on Female Labor Force Participation, Commitment to Work and Intra-household Time Utilization

A central question in economics is why some countries are substantially richer than others. The income per capita of the five richest countries in the world is 30 times the income of the five poorest. It is a fundamental quantitative question for which growth and development economists still have no definite answer. The first chapter of this dissertation contributes to this literature. The chapter offers new evidence on the sources of cross-country income differences by investigating the role public capital in development accounting. I explicitly measure private and public capital stocks, and I find large differences in both types of capital across countries. Moreover, differences in private capital are larger than the ones I find for total capital for the richest and poorest countries. The methodology I use implies a share of public capital in output of at most 10%. My findings indicate that differences in capital stocks can not account for a substantial part of the observed dispersion in income across countries.

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