When assessing future growth prospects, does it matter how the economy grows now? In other words, does the current structure of demand affect future growth? This question is analyzed in our paper by using global and EU panel data. The result is quite striking: consumption-led growth - either in...

We provide an analysis that might help distinguish rationally justified movements in house prices from potentially non-rational movements, using a two-sector business cycle model, in which investment in housing is subject to collateral constraints. A large portion of the evolution of U.S. house...

When assessing future growth prospects, does it matter how the economy grows now? In other words, does the current structure of demand affect future growth? This question is analyzed in our paper by using global and EU panel data. The result is quite striking: consumption-led growth - either in...

Since 1991, survey expectations of long-run output growth for the U.S. relative to the rest of the world exhibit a pattern strikingly similar to that of the U.S. current account, and thus also to global imbalances. We show that this finding can to a large extent be rationalized in a two-region...

This paper presents a non-technical overview of the recent investment literature with a special emphasis on the connection between technological progress and the investment decision. First of all, we acknowledge that some dramatic advances have been made in the 1990s in understanding and...

In this paper, we extend the usual models of irreversible investment under uncertainty by introducing the stock of public capital as an input for the private sector. Public investment takes place in a stochastic environment. Public capital then increases the productivity of private capital which...

This paper investigates empirically whether the relation between finance and growth depends on a specific type of financing. I construct a novel panel data set for 34 high income countries over the time period from 1995 to 2014 based on financial accounts data. It allows distinguishing between...

In this paper, we explore the effects of dialectal diversity on economic performance by drawing evidence from Chinese prefecture-level cities. Our dataset is a panel of 5-year average data over the period from 2001 to 2015 including 274 cities. We compute five indices of Chinese dialectal...

We use the elements of a macroeconomic production function—physical capital, human capital, labor, and technology—together with standard growth models to frame the role of religion in economic growth. Unifying a growing literature, we argue that religion can enhance or impinge upon economic...

This paper studies the relationship between patience and comparative development through a combination of reduced-form analyses and model estimations. Based on a globally representative dataset on time preference in 76 countries, we document two sets of stylized facts. First, patience is...