An aggregate production function is estimated with recent cointegrating techniques that are particularly appropriate for estimating long-run relationships. The empirical results suggest that the growth of output in France has been spurred by increased trade integration within the European...

We estimate a gravity model to address the question of whether Africa’s bilateral trade with industrial countries is “unusual” compared with other developing country regions. Our main finding is that the unusually low level of African trade is explained by economic size, geographical...

Keller (1998) reexamines Coe and Helpman’s (1995) analysis of international R&D spillovers focusing on the weights used to define the foreign R&D capital stock. Keller creates “random” weights and shows that they give rise to positive estimates of international R&D spillovers, casting...

The empirical analysis indicates that in the Federal Republic the unemployed primarily influence the relationship between the level of real wages and productivity, rather than the growth of wages. This result suggests a distinction between an equilibrium natural rate of unemployment, which is...

The IMF Working Papers series is designed to make IMF staff research available to a wide audience. Almost 300 Working Papers are released each year, covering a wide range of theoretical and analytical topics, including balance of payments, monetary and fiscal issues, global liquidity, and...

This paper argues that an important group of labor market policies are complementary in the sense that the effect of each policy is greater when implemented in conjunction with the other policies than in isolation. This may explain why the diverse, piecemeal labor market reforms in many European...

There is considerable evidence from industrial countries that the output gap is an important determinant of inflation. We examine whether the gap model also works in developing, newly industrializing, and industrial Asian economies. Our output gaps are based on a new nonparametric estimation...

We examine the extent to which developing countries that do little, if any, research and development themselves benefit from R&D that is performed in the industrial countries. By trading with an industrial country that has a large “stock of knowledge” from its cumulative R&D activities, a...

The empirical analysis in ""International R&D Spillovers"" (Coe and Helpman, 1995) is first revisited by applying modern panel cointegration estimation techniques to an expanded data set that we have constructed for the purpose of this study. The new estimates confirm the key results reported in...

The failure of declining trade-related costs to be reflected in estimates of the standard gravity model of bilateral trade might be called the ""missing globalization puzzle."" This puzzle is most apparent in the estimated distance coefficients found in the literature, which show no evidence of...