Is there a "middle income trap" ? Theory suggests that the determinants of growth at low and high income levels may be different. If countries struggle to transition from growth strategies that are effective at low income levels to growth strategies that are effective at high income levels, they...

In countries with limited access to finance, firms accumulate retained earnings to finance indivisible investment projects. McKinnon (1973) illustrates that when cash is used as a primary store of value, inflation may discourage investment as it increases the cost of accumulating retained...

This paper studies the issue of real exchange rate misalignment and the difficulties in settling international real exchange rate disputes. The authors show theoretically that determining when a country should be sanctioned for real exchange rate "manipulations" is difficult: in some situations...

Using survey data from the Indonesian manufacturing industry, this paper investigates the impact of minimum wage on employment and wages offered by Indonesian manufacturing firms from 1993 to 2006. It shows that the estimated effects of minimum wage on employment are positive within a province...

Is a five-day workweek followed by a two-day weekend a socially optimal schedule? This paper presents a model in which labor productivity and the marginal utility of leisure evolve endogenously over the workweek. Labor productivity is shaped by two forces: restfulness, which decreases over the...

This paper studies the possibility of using financial regulation that prohibits the use of money substitutes as a tool for mitigating the adverse effects of deviations from the Friedman rule. When inflation is not too high regulation aimed at eliminating money substitutes improves welfare by...

This paper establishes that the rise in the income share of information and communication technology accounts for half of the decline in labor income share in the United States. This decline can be decomposed into a sharp decline in the income share of ?routine? labor?which is relatively more...

Conventional wisdom suggests too little information and communication technologies (ICT) in poor countries. Indeed, within 70 countries at various levels of development, there is a positive relationship between income per capita and the capital share of ICT. While this regularity is consistent...

This paper estimates the effect of government investment on private investment in a sample of 39 low-income countries. Fluctuations in a predetermined component of disbursements on loans from official creditors to developing country governments are used as an instrument for fluctuations in...

This paper proposes a measure of the extent to which a financial sector is connected to the real economy. The Measure of Connectedness is a measure of the composition of assets, namely the share of credit to the non-financial sectors over the total credit market instruments. The aggregate...