This paper develops new, far more extensive estimates of export quality, covering 178 countries and hundreds of products over 1962–2010. Quality upgrading is particularly rapid during the early stages of development, with quality convergence largely completed as a country reaches upper...

This paper proposes a new index of sectoral labor distortion using employment and valueaddedshares. We show that this index is highly correlated with growth both crosssectionallyand over time. We also use it to compare the degree of distortion amongcountries and identify sectors where the...

The COVID-19 crisis has had a tremendous economic impact for all countries. Yet, assessing the full impact of the crisis has been frequently hampered by the delayed publication of official GDP statistics in several emerging market and developing economies. This paper outlines a machine-learning...

We introduce unFEAR, Unsupervised Feature Extraction Clustering, to identify economic crisis regimes. Given labeled crisis and non-crisis episodes and the corresponding features values, unFEAR uses unsupervised representation learning and a novel mode contrastive autoencoder to group episodes...

This paper documents the downward trend in the labor share of global income since the early 1990s, as well as its heterogeneous evolution across countries, industries and worker skill groups, using a newly assembled dataset, and analyzes the drivers behind it. Technological progress, along with...

The U.S. labor share of income has been on a secular downward trajectory since thebeginning of the new millennium. Using data that are disaggregated across both state andindustry, we show the decline in the labor share is broad-based but the extent of the fallvaries greatly. Exploiting a new...

Recent technological developments and past technology transitions suggest that the worldcould be on the verge of a profound shift in transportation technology. The return of the electriccar and its adoption, like that of the motor vehicle in place of horses in early 20th century,could cut oil...

Evidence that the automation of routine tasks has contributed to the polarization of labor markets hasbeen documented for many developed economies, but little is known about its incidence in developingeconomies. We propose a measure of the exposure to routinization-that is, the risk of the...

The labor share in Europe has been on a downward trend. This paper finds that the decline is concentrated in manufacture and among low- to mid-skilled workers. The shifting nature of employment away from full-time jobs and a rollback of employment protection, unemployment benefits and...

The latest advancement in financial technology has posed unprecedented challenges for incumbent banks. This paper analyzes the implications of these challenges on bank competitveness, and explores the factors that could support digital advancement in banks. The analysis shows that the...