Economists are skeptical about the economic benefits of hosting "mega-events" such as the Olympic Games or the World Cup, since such activities have considerable cost and seem to yield few tangible benefits. These doubts are rarely shared by policymakers and the population, who are typically...

Recent studies, which have attempted to determine what causes an industrial sector in a state to grow, have ignored the general role of the state's economic development agency. We extend the analysis to include its effect, and determine that economic development expenditure by the state is a...

This paper examines the channels through which country characteristics affect growth. We investigate whether "primitives," or rates of factor accumulation, are sufficient statistics for economic growth, and whether "ancillary variables," such as political instability, income distribution, and...

The influential work of Ramey and Ramey (1995) highlighted an empirical relationship that has now come to be regarded as conventional wisdom—that output volatility and growth are negatively correlated. We reexamine this relationship in the context of globalization—a term typically used to...

A number of studies have stressed the role of movements in U.S. interest rates and country spreads in driving business cycles in emerging market economies. At the same time, country spreads have been found to respond to changes in both the U.S. interest rate and domestic conditions in emerging...

Estimates of the speed of convergence vary widely and depend on the methodology employed. While cross-sectional regressions typically find slow convergence, time series estimates suggest that incomes converge rapidly. This paper uses panel methods to combine cross-sectional and time series...

This paper clarifies one of the puzzling results of the economic growth literature: the impact of military expenditure is frequently found to be non-significant or negative, yet most countries spend a large fraction of their GDP on defense and the military. We start by empirical evaluation of...

This paper studies the transitional dynamics in a quality ladder model of endogenous growth in which North-South trade leads to technological diffusion through reverse engineering of intermediate goods. The concept of learning-to-learn is incorporated into both imitative and innovative...

Does a country's (long-term) growth depend upon what happens in countries that are nearby? Such linkages could occur for a variety of reasons, including demand and technology spillovers. We present a series of tests to determine the existence of such relationships and the forms that they might...

Remarks for the Urban Land Institute at the Emerging Trends in Real Estate Conference, Atlanta, Georgia, November 10, 2009