Most conventional macroeconomic measures of innovation, such as research and development (R&D) spending or patenting, focus on frontier innovation in contrast to the adoption and adaptation of existing technologies. To capture technology adoption at the country level, this paper exploits a novel...

This paper evaluates the growth performance of more than 200 economies. It identifies instances of relatively strong economic performance after the 2008-09 global financial crisis, and asks if determinants of sustained strong (and weak) performance have changed in recent years. It finds that...

This paper traces the relationship between quarterly estimates of economic activity and people's mobility during the Covid-19 crisis in a sample of 53 economies. Over time, the estimates of elasticity of value added with respect to mobility have been declining, to around 20 percent at the start...

This paper looks at the determinants of the quality of economic institutions such as rule of law and control of corruption in a large sample of countries. The analysis pays particular attention to the quality of democratic institutions as a potential determinant. Both types of institutions –...

The paper provides a cross-country empirical analysis of the impact of corruption on foreign direct investment flows. The gravity model estimates suggest that if control of corruption in the destination country improves, investment flows from cleaner countries rise more than they do from...

Non-performing loans (NPLs) are a burden for both lender and borrower; they contract credit supply, distort allocation of credit, worsen market confidence and slow economic growth. So what is the best way to deal with them? This paper compares three different scenarios: actively reducing NPLs,...

This paper uses a novel dataset on investments considered by the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development to examine project selection and project design at a multilateral development bank which pursues a combination of financial and environmental, social or governance (ESG) objectives....

We empirically investigate the relationship between corruption and growth using a firm-level data set that is unique in scale, covering almost 88,000 firms across 141 economies in 2006-2020, with wideranging corruption experiences. The scale and detail of our data allow us to explore the...

This paper investigates the impact of education reforms in Estonia on adult skills, using the PIAAC surveys conducted by the OECD. Estonia implemented comprehensive education reforms in the early 1990s throughout Estonian-speaking schools while in Russian-speaking schools less comprehensive...

This paper sheds light on the effectiveness of policies addressing high non-performing loans (NPLs). Using data on ownership of subsidiaries of foreign banks in Emerging Europe, we first show that changes in NPLs of parent banks are associated with changes in NPLs of their foreign affiliates,...