Recent empirical studies document that the level of resource misallocation in the service sector is significantly higher than in the manufacturing sector. We quantify the importance of this difference and study its sources. Conservative estimates for Portugal (2008) show that closing this gap,...

For US postwar data, the paper explains central consumption, labor, investment and output correlations and volatilities along with output growth persistence by including a human capital investment sector and a variable physical capital utilization rate. Strong internal "amplication" results from...

Using a newly constructed dataset on trade in services for 192 countries from 1970 to 2014, this paper shows that services currently constitute one-fourth of world trade and an increasingly important component of global production. A detailed analysis of patterns and stylized facts reveals that...

This paper identifies a new mechanism leading to inefficiency in capital reallocation at theextensive margin when an economy experiences a sectoral boom. I argue that imperfectionsin the financial market and capital barriers to entry in the booming sector create amisallocation of managerial...

A low-income country such as Haiti that confronts an environment of diminishing aidinflows must assess tradeoffs among the available policy options: spending cuts,monetization, sales of debt, or use of foreign reserves. To provide the analytical tools forthis task, the paper draws from a set of...

We document that publicly listed Chinese state-owned enterprises (SOEs) are less productive and profitable than publicly listed firms in which the state has no ownership stake. In particular, Chinese listed SOEs are more capital intensive and have a lower average product of capital than...

Natural resource revenues provide a valuable source to finance public investment in developing countries, which frequently face borrowing constraints and tax revenue mobilization problems. This paper develops a dynamic stochastic small open economy model to analyze the macroeconomic effects of...

Bureaucratically organized systems tend to be less efficient than economies in which agents are free to choose their output targets, as well as the means to meet them. This paper presents a simple model of planner-manager interactions and shows how bureaucratic economies can end up in a...

Many small middle-income countries (SMICs) in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) have experienced a moderation in growth in recent years. Although factor accumulation, most notably capital deepening, was crucial to the success of many SMICs historically, this growth model appears to have run its course....

We introduce subsistence requirements in food consumption into a simple new-Keynesianmodel with flexible food and sticky non-food prices. We study how the endogenous structuraltransformation that results from subsistence affects the dynamics of the economy, the design ofmonetary policy, and the...