In Jones (2002), Lucas (2009), and Lucas and Moll (2014), among others, growth is a function of new ideas, and reflects Kuznets (1960) useful knowledge (or testable knowledge) as a main driver of growth. In both Kuznets and Jones, the discovery of new ideas is tied to population growth. In the...

Effectively, the government of Iraq, not the Iraqi people, owns the oil wealth; the oil industry is a government monopoly. We make the case against such monopoly and for a competitive oil industry. We estimate the share of oil in real output to be relatively large, and show that most...

Endogenous growth models based on micro-foundations predict that total factor productivity (TFP) growth is positively associated with effective research effort. We use macroeconomic-pooled time series-cross sectional data for the G7 countries from 2000 to 2017 to provide a robust estimate of...

We depart from the empirical literature on testing the finance led growth. Instead of regression analysis, we use a semi-endogenous growth model, which identifies two productivity growth paths: a steady state and a transitional path. Steady state growth is anchored by population growth. In the...

In Razzak (2006), I argued that the state-ownership and the state-management of oil (on behalf of the Iraqi people) is not conducive to democracy and economic development. Iraqis have had dictators for decades. They were only able to maintain power by controlling the oil. The events of 2019...

We provide a general equilibrium model with optimizing agents to compute the natural rate of interest for the G7 countries over the period 2000 to 2017. The model is solved for the equilibrium natural rate of interest, which is determined by a parsimonious equation that is easily computed from...

We use aggregated macroeconomic data for 43 countries to test the microeconomic condition for Perfect Competition, whereby the price level is equal to the marginal cost in the long run. We postulate two forms of Perfect Competition in the macro data: a weaker-form and a stronger-form. The former...

I extend the Glick and Rogoff (1995) aggregate time-series, empirical, intertemporal model of country-investment (and the current account) to a sectoral-level, and estimate it for New Zealand. I fit the model to panel data of eleven industries from 1988-2009. The sectoral-level investment growth...

A persistent increase in the unemployment rate ignites speculations about whether the changes to unemployment are structural or cyclical. The New Zealand economy has been through major restructuring since the mid-1980s. The labour market’s institutional changes were the last in the sequence of...

Unanticipated shocks could lead to instability, which is reflected in statistically significant changes in distributions of random variables. Changes in the conditional moments of stationary variables are predictable. We provide a framework based on a statistic for the Sample Generalized...