Most economic activity occurs in cities. This creates a tension between local increasing returns, implied by the existence of cities, and aggregate constant returns, implied by balanced growth. To address this tension, we develop a theory of economic growth in an urban environment. We show that...

Why do firm growth and exit rates decline with size? What determines the size distribution of firms? This paper presents a theory of firm dynamics that simultaneously rationalizes the basic facts on firm growth, exit, and size distributions. The theory emphasizes the accumulation of industry...

Financial crises in emerging market countries appear to be very costly: both output and a host of partial welfare indicators decline dramatically. The magnitude of these costs is puzzling both from an accounting perspective -- factor usage does not decline as much as output, resulting in large...

En la serie de Documentos de Análisis del Personal Técnico del FMI se presentan los últimos análisis e investigaciones sobre políticas elaborados por miembros del personal técnico del FMI, que se publican para recibir comentarios y fomentar el debate. Estos documentos generalmente son...

In this paper we analyse the ability of time and state dependent price setting rules to explain durations of price spells or the probability of changing prices. Our results suggest that simple time dependent models cannot be seen as providing a reasonable approximation to the data and that state...

This paper elaborates on the alternative measure of persistence recently suggested in Marques (2004), which is based on the idea of mean reversion. A formal distinction between γ, the unconditional probability of a given process not crossing its mean in period t and γ̂, its estimator, is made...

Recent empirical studies document that the level of resource misallocation in the service sector is significantly higher than in the manufacturing sector. We quantify the importance of this difference and study its sources. Conservative estimates for Portugal (2008) show that closing this gap,...