In a widely cited paper, Young (1995) showed that the East Asian miracles (Hong Kong, Korea, Singapore and Taiwan) grew mostly through input accumulation during the period 1966-1990. Using data for 83 countries taken from the Penn World Table, version 6.1, and Barro and Lee (2000), we use a...

This article presents evidence on the positive effect of international trade on productivity growth using industrial level data preceding and following Brazil's trade liberalization in 1988-90. Our data reveal large and widespread productivity improvement across industries after barriers to...

Due to widespread government intervention and import-substitution industrialization, there has been a general perception that Latin America has been much less productive than the leading economies in the last decades. In this paper, however, we show that until the mid-seventies Latin America had...

This article investigates the causes in the reduction of labor force participation of the old. We argue that the changes in social security policy and in technology, and the introduction of Medicare may account for most of the changes in retirement over the second part of the last century in the...