Schooling is typically found to be highly correlated with individual earnings in African countries.  However, African firm or sector level studies have failed to identify a similarly strong effect for average worker schooling levels on productivity.  This has been interpreted as evidence that...

Many recent descriptive studies find convex schooling-earnings profiles in developing countries.  In these countries forward-looking students should attach option values to completing lower levels of schooling.  Another option value may arise due to the uncertain economic environment in which...

Despite the widely recognised importance of the manufacturing industry for successful development few studies investigate this sector in cross-country analysis. We fill this gap in the literature by analysing manufacturing production across a large number of developing and developed economies....

The Cross-country growth literature commonly uses aggregate economy datasets such as the Penn World Table (PWT) to estimate homogeneous production function or convergence regression models.  Against the background of a dual economy framework this paper investigates the potential bias arising...

Since the seminal contribution of Gregory Mankiw, David Romer and David Weil (1992), the growth empirics literature has used increasingly sophisticated methods to select relevant growth determinants in estimating cross-section regressions.  The vast majority of empirical approaches however...

In this paper we ask how technological differences in manufacturing across countries can best be modeled when using a standard production function approach.  We show that it is important to allow for differences in technology as measured by differences in parameters.  Of similar importance are...

In this paper we investigate a 'global' production function for agriculture, using FAO data for 128 countries from 1961-2002.  Our review of the empirical literature in this field highlights that existing cross-country studies largely neglect variable time-series properties, parameter...

Despite the widely recognised importance of the manufacturing industry for successful development relatively few studies empirically investigate this sector in cross-country analysis. In this paper we attempt to fill this gap in the literature by investigating manufacturing production across a...