Total factor productivity (TFP) in Latin America has not increased relative to the US since the mid- 1970s, and in many countries it has declined. Moreover, resource misallocation can lower aggregate TFP. This paper presents evidence based on firm-level data from 10 Latin American countries to...

Over the last three decades, Total Factor Productivity growth in Latin America has disappointed and informality persisted. To shed light on this outcome, we exploit a unique database (by Latin American standards) for Mexico, a country where manufacturing exports grew from 7 to 33 per cent of...

What determines the aggregate and distributional effects of new transportation infrastructure? One key overlooked channel is the role that infrastructure policy plays in changing the incentives of firms to enter, exit, and grow--in turn generating endogenous changes in local productivity. In...

We use panel data on Mexican manufacturing plants to study the dynamics of plant-level exporting activity at both the extensive and the intensive margins and the connection between exporting dynamics and plant-level total factor productivity growth. We find that exporting activity has a ladder...

We use panel data on Mexican manufacturing plants to study the connection between plants' responses to changes in the economic environment and their contributions to aggregate productivity growth in the period following the implementation of the North American Trade Agreement (NAFTA). In all...

The recovery from the current deep recession caused by the COVID-19 pandemic will require raising productivity through structural reforms. This implies a number of challenges for economic policies. With large parts of the economy shielded from competition, firms face weak incentives to become...

Brazil spends around 15% of GDP on different social benefits, but within these expenditures, different benefits have different social impacts. While the small conditional cash transfer programme Bolsa Família is well-targeted to the poor and has a strong diminishing effect on inequality,...

Most studies of total factor productivity (TFP) and long-term production functions use capital stock time series obtained from ad hoc estimates of the rate of depreciation and the initial capital stock. This paper introduces a methodology that allows the simultaneous econometric estimation of...

The Spanish growth experience over the 1995-2007 period was characterized by the remarkable surge in employment and investment as well as the dismal evolution of productivity. These macroeconomic fluctuations were coupled with an unprecedented credit boom fueled by a housing bubble. This article...

Can policymakers improve macroeconomic performance by encouraging the entry of high-performance startups? To answer this question, we construct a novel and comprehensive data set on 1.3 million startups in ten European countries. We apply cluster analysis to identify distinct startup types and...