We investigate the impact of 20th--century European colonization on growth in Africa. We find that in the 1960--88 period growth has been faster for dependencies than for colonies; for British and French colonies than for Portuguese, Belgian and Italian ones; and for countries with less economic...

We investigate the impact of 20th-century European colonization on growth. We find that colonial heritage, as measured by the identity of the metropolitan ruler and by the degree of economic penetration, matters for the heterogeneity of growth performances in Africa. Colonial indicators are...

In this paper, we show that traditional comparisons of Mean Squared Prediction Error (MSPE) between two competing forecasts may be highly controversial. This is so because when some specific conditions of efficiency are not met, the forecast displaying the lowest MSPE will also display the...

The short-term economic benefits of oil and gas production from shale for the U.S. economy have been widely discussed, but the long-term effects remain unclear. These long-run impacts likely depend upon the degree to which such oil and gas production can impact growth in capital per worker or...

During the 1980s and the 1990s, private investment in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) has on average shown a decreasing or stagnant trend. This contrasts with the situation of the Asian economies, where private investment has always been more dynamic. In this paper, it is empirically...

The paper, written for the centennial celebration of Kalecki’s birth, considers the legacy for modern macroeconomics of Kalecki’s theory of income determination, which is reconstructed in its analytical constituent parts, referring in detail to the original sources. Kalecki’s...

This paper investigates the effects of open-market operations on the distributions of assets and prices. It offers a theoretical framework to incorporate multiple asset holdings in a tractable heterogeneous-agent model. This model features competitive search, which produces distributions of...

It is found that commodity price shocks largely affect the mining, construction and manufacturing industries in Australia. However, the financial and insurance sector is found to be relatively unaffected. Mining industry profits and nominal output substantially increase in response to commodity...

The contribution of this paper to complement theoretical and qualitative mobile penetration literature with empirical evidence is twofold: firstly, we assess the income-redistributive effect of mobile phone penetration and; secondly, the instrumentality of financial development dynamics in this...

The employment of financial development indicators without due consideration to country/regional specific financial development realities remains an issue of substantial policy relevance. Financial depth in the perspective of money supply is not equal to liquid liabilities in every development...