Total factor productivity plays an important role in the growth of the economy. Using recently available state level data over 1993 and 2005, we find widespread regional variation in productivity changes. In the beginning of the liberalization era, improvement in technical efficiency contributes...

Europe's financial landscape has substantial institutional variety. This reflects different societal responses to (or preferences with regard to) trade-offs. For monetary policy, it implies a challenging environment, particularly in times of financial crises. Using anon-linear VAR-model we...

Europe’s financial landscape has substantial institutional variety. This reflects different societal responses to (or preferences with regard to) trade-offs. For monetary policy, it implies a challenging environment, particularly in times of financial crises. Using a non-linear VAR-model we...

This paper proposes a theory for the gradual evolution of knowledge diffusion and growth over the very long run. A feedback mechanism between capital accumulation and the ease of knowledge diffusion explains a long epoch of (quasi-) stasis and an epoch of high growth linked by a gradual economic...

I argue in this paper that the `speed of convergence' estimated in recent works on `convergence' does not capture `actual' convergence towards a steady state, but rather conditional dynamics towards a moving target. Although this conditional convergence can be taken to imply that there are...

The paper analyzes the convergence dynamics of a log-linearized open- economy neoclassical growth model under the assumptions of large adjustment costs for human capital investment, moderate adjustment costs for physical capital investment, and perfect capital mobility. The model can be...

In this paper, we introduce adoption costs in a canonical vintage capital model. Adoption costs take the form of a direct loss in production during a fixed period of time. We explicitly characterize the optimal machine replacement policy as a function of the adoption period. Using an explicit...

Investment in machinery is a key aspect in the analysis of long-term economic growth during the era of the spread of industrialisation. But, historiography has only revealed what the pace of capital accumulation was in a few Latin American economies. This article offers continuous (annual) and...

Most studies of comparative productivities fail to find evidence of convergence in OECD manufacturing despite major economic growth theories predicting convergence. Using manufacturing data for 19 OECD countries over the period from 1870 to 2006 this study finds strong evidence of unconditional...