Abstract The paper considers formally the mapping from distortions in the allocations of resources across firms to aggregate productivity. TFP gaps are characterized as the integral of a strictly concave function with respect to an employment-weighted measure of distortions. Size related...

In an 80-country panel since the 1960s, the convergence rate for per capita GDP is around 1.7% per year. This "beta convergence" is conditional on an array of explanatory variables that hold constant countries' long-run characteristics. The introduction of country fixed effects generates a much...

What determines firm growth over the life-cycle? Exploiting unique firm panel data on internal organization, balance sheets and innovation, representative of the entire Canadian economy, we study recent theories that examine life-cycle patterns for firm growth. These theories include...

During the Second Industrial Revolution, 1860-1900, many new technologies, including electricity, were invented. These inventions launched a transition to a new economy, a period of about 70 years of ongoing, rapid technical change. After this revolution began, however, several decades passed...

In the 3 years before the 2008 Financial Crisis, GDP growth in sub Saharan Africa (averaged over individual economies) was around 6%, or 2 percentage points above mean growth rates for the preceding 10 years. This period also coincided with significant Chinese FDI flows into these countries,...

The negative effect of distance on bilateral trade is one of the most robust findings in international trade. However, the underlying causes of this negative relationship are less well understood. This paper exploits a temporary shock to distance, the closing of the Suez canal in 1967 and its...

This paper develops a human capital measure in the sense of Schultz (1960) and then reevaluates the contribution of human capital to China's economic growth. The results indicate that human capital plays a much more important role in China's economic growth than available literature suggests,...

This paper examines whether management changes caused by the entry of the baby boom into the workforce explain the US productivity slowdown in the 1970s and resurgence in the 1990s. Lucas (1978) suggests that the quality of managers plays a significant role in determining output. If there is...

This paper develops a dynamic model of trade and growth that we use to study how openness affects economic growth. In our model, heterogeneous firms choose to either produce with their existing technology or search within the domestic economy to adopt a better technology. These choices determine...

We construct and estimate a model that features endogenous growth and technology diffusion. The spillover effects from research and development provide a link between business cycle fluctuations and long-term growth. Therefore, productivity growth is related to the state of the economy. Shocks...