From Hugo Domic
Following our post announcing Oded Galor’s Conference Monday, we write now to present in more detail Unified Growth Theory.
The best source is Oded Galor website. There we can find all his papers and keynote speeches (you can find the slides for monday also).
Unified growth theory was developed to address the inability of endogenous growth theory to explain key empirical regularities in the growth processes of individual economies and the world economy as a whole. Endogenous growth theory was satisfied with accounting for empirical regularities in the growth process of developed economies over the last hundred years. As a consequence it was not able to explain the qualitatively different empirical regularities that characterized the growth process over longer time horizons in both developed and less developed economies. Unified growth theories are endogenous growth theories that are consistent with the entire process of development, and in particular the transition from the epoch of Malthusian stagnation that had characterized most of the process of development to the contemporary era of sustained economic growth. You can find more on wikipedia.
But for those of you that are interested in going deeper we recommend the following structure of readings:
1) Getting the Big Picture, a deep interview of Oded Galor by Brian Snowdon.
2)The foundation paper
3)The follow up paper http://ideas.repec.org/a/aea/aecrev/v90y2000i4p806-828.html
3)The survey and development
Also from other authors you can find Hansen and Prescott, Doepke (2004) or O’Rourke (2008)
This is a great idea and it deserves to be pushed to its limits, be it theoretical or empirical, the possibilities are huge for a graduate student!
