We investigate how labor and investment demand at the firm level (gross as well as net and replacement investment separately) differs in French, German and U.S. manufacturing, and has changed since the 1974-75 crisis. We use three consistent panel data samples of large firms for1970-79, and rely...

Economists have often argued that "pay for performance" is the optimal compensation scheme. However, use of the simplest form of pay for performance, the piece rate, has been in decline in manufacturing in recent decades. We show both theoretically and empirically that these changes are due to...

Central banks have evolved for close to four centuries. This paper argues that for two centuries central banks caught up to the strategies followed by the leading central banks of the era; the Bank of England in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and the Federal Reserve in the twentieth...

We study the impact of FDI on the productivity of host-country firms. FDI has positive spillovers only when foreign and domestic firms use similar technologies. Channeling FDI to sectors where firms share similar technology would significantly increase productivity spillovers from FDI. We show...

This paper examines the historical evolution of central bank credibility using both historical narrative and empirics for a group of 16 countries, both advanced and emerging. It shows how the evolution of credibility has gone through a pendulum where credibility was high under the classical gold...

In this paper we provide empirical measures of central bank credibility and augment these with historical narratives from eleven countries. To the extent we are able to apply reliable institutional information we can also indirectly assess their role in influencing the credibility of the...