This paper investigates the impact of foreign direct investment on total factor productivity conditional on relative backwardness in a panel of 45 African countries over the period 1980-2012. We use two measures of relative backwardness, namely: the distance from technological frontier and the...

This paper focuses on the growth and convergence of Central, Eastern and South-Eastern European EU countries (CESEE). We argue that the factors behind the pre-crisis growth model of the region - skilled yet affordable labour force, foreign direct investment, imports of productivity-enhancing...

Economic growth has become a prominent political goal worldwide, despite its severe conflicts with ecological sustainability. Are "growth policies" only a question of political or individual will, or do "growth imperatives" exist that make them "inescapable"? We structure the debate along two...

Theoretical models of growth reveal that either exogenous or endogenous, technology is the main driving force behind the long-run economic growth. Furthermore, in the endogenous growth framework, diffusion of technology is the basic mechanism of per capita income convergence among countries....

We study the implications of the creative destruction lifecycle of innovation for asset prices. We develop a general equilibrium model of endogenous firm creation and destruction where 'incremental' innovations by incumbents and 'radical' innovations by entrants drive productivity improvements....

We prove a generalized, multi-factor version of the Uzawa steady-state growth theorem. The theorem implies that neoclassical growth models need at least three factors of production to be consistent with empirical evidence on both the capital-labor elasticity of substitution and the existence of...

Do recessions harm investment in technology and thus future aggregate supply? We provide novel evidence on this question using unique, granular data on innovation investment in R&D and diffusion from a representative survey of German firms. Our data allows to identify the crisis-induced...

We analyze investment decisions when information is costly, with and without delegation to an agent. We use a rational-inattention model and compare it with a canonical signal-extraction model. We identify three "investment conditions". In "sour" conditions, no information is acquired and no...

This paper provides an overview of the currently available evidence on the importance of information and communication technologies (ICT) for developments in productivity growth in the euro area. On the basis of the available data, there is evidence of an increased contribution of ICT to...

This paper examines the effect of wealth concentration on firms' market power when firm entry is driven by entrepreneurs facing uninsurable idiosyncratic risks. Under greater wealth concentration, households in the lower end of the wealth distribution are more risk averse and less willing (or...