We revisit Western Europe's record with labor-productivity convergence, and tentatively extrapolate its implications for the future path of Eastern Europe. The poorer Western European countries caught up with the richer ones through both higher rates of physical capital accumulation and greater...

A widely held view is that openness to international trade leads to higher GDP volatility, as trade increases specialization and hence exposure to sector-specific shocks. We revisit the common wisdom and argue that when country-wide shocks are important, openness to international trade can lower...

Systematic differences in the timing of wage setting decisions among industrialized countries provide an ideal framework to study the importance of wage rigidity in the transmission of monetary policy. The Japanese Shunto presents the best-known case of bunching in wage setting decisions: From...