This note analyzes a model of endogenous fertility in the presence of financial market assets and social security pensions. Given the children externality, the fertility rate chosen in a market economy is too low compared to the Social Optimum, asking for a corrective policy. Indeed, the...

Multilateral development banks are sometimes thought to engage in "defensive lending" -- the practice of extending new loans purely in order to ensure that existing loans are repaid. We empirically examine this hypothesis using data on lending extended by and repayments to the International...

This paper assesses the impact of mobile phone rollout on economic growth in a sample of African countries from 1988 to 2007. Further, in light of the large financial infrastructure gap in African countries, we investigate whether mobile phone development fosters economic growth through better...

The available evidence on the effects of aid on growth is notoriously mixed. We use a novel empirical methodology, a heterogeneous panel vector-autoregression model identified through factor analysis, to study the dynamic response of exports, imports, and per capita GDP growth to a “global”...

This paper is about the role of policy, institutions, and culture in creating a strong negative tradeoff between productivity and employment growth across groups of countries within Europe. Throughout the postwar era until 1995 labor productivity grew faster in Europe than in the United States....

In this study we test for the ‘power’ or aggressiveness of various journal weighting schemes, especially those based on the recursive adjustment methodology first developed by Liebowitz and Palmer. Using data generated by New Zealand’s academic economists, we provide quantitative measures...

I examine the effect of labour market policies and institutions on the transmission of macroeconomic shocks to the labour market, using both aggregate and industry-level annual data for 23 OECD countries, 23 business-sector industries and up to 29 years. I find that high and progressive labour...

The quality of contracting institutions has been thought to be of second-order importance next to the impact that good property rights institutions can have on long-run growth. Using a large range of proxies for each type of institution, we find a robust negative link between the quality of...

This paper searches for the determinants of government-funded R&D. The goal is to disentangle whether the efficiency considerations overwhelmingly emphasized by the theoretical literature are indeed the main driving force behind public R&D expenditures. Another goal of the paper is to assess...

The single currency was expected to make national balance of payments irrelevant for euro-area members. From 2010 onwards, however, governments, but also banks and non-financial companies in several euro-area countries have had difficulty getting access to non-resident financing. Assessing...