This dissertation is comprised of three self-contained chapters on the determinants of economic development over the medium-to-long run. In the first chapter, I examine how a country’s age composition matters for economic growth. I find that an important dimension of a country's age structure is its age diversity. My results suggest that age diversity is beneficial for economic growth up to a point due to complementarity between cohorts, but it is detrimental to it thereafter as firms need not value the skills of each cohort equally. These results are established theoretically in an overlapping generations model, whose predictions are empirically tested in country-level panel data for 1950-2010. In the second chapter, I contribute to a strand of literature on how institutions and culture can jointly determine economic outcomes. I find that, in the context of the 20th century, second-generation immigrants in the United States whose parents have been exposed to more democratic institutions are more likely to be upwardly mobile. Further, I explore what might explain this robust result. I find suggestive evidence that democratic institutions instil the value of meritocracy in people more so than do autocratic institutions. This increased belief in meritocracy appears to explain why democracy and mobility are related. In the third co-authored chapter, we investigate how large-scale recycling programs affect the sectoral composition of economies linked by trade. This chapter suggests that large-scale recycling policies introduced in one country can have unintended spillover effects in other countries, potentially affecting their sectoral composition. We build a multi-country, multi-sector model of recycling and trade, and find that if an advanced economy greatly increases the fraction of output it recycles, then its mining-intensive trading partners will be incentivised to switch out of raw material extraction and into manufacturing triggering a sectoral transformation.
