We revisit the well-known fact that richer countries tend to produce a larger variety of goods and analyze economic development through (export) diversifcation. We show that countries are more likely to enter ‘nearby’ industries, i.e., industries that require fewer new occupations. To...

We study the factors behind the public sector premium in Albania and Sri Lanka, the group heterogeneity in the premium, the sources of public sector wage compression, and the impact of this compression on the way individuals self-select between the public and the private sector. Similar to other...

Latin America's enormous endowment of natural resources has an impact on many countries of the region. Economic liberalization in several countries was followed by rapid growth of foreign investment and exports of natural resource-intensive products. Growth of labor-intensive manufacturing...

In this paper, social mobility is measured by looking at the extent to which family background determines socioeconomic success. An index of social mobility for developing countries is proposed based on the correlation of schooling gaps between siblings

This paper questions the conventional contrast between flows of "bad cholesterol", represented by short-term debt, and flows of "good cholesterol", represented by longer-term foreign direct investment. The findings suggest that high levels of FDI are not, in fact, a sign of economic good health....

We study episodes where economic growth decelerates to negative rates. While the majority of these episodes are of short duration, a substantial fraction last for a longer period of time than can be explained as the result of business-cycle dynamics. The duration, depth and associated output...

Understanding the differences between rich and poor places is complicated by the fact that places differ from each other in numerous ways. In this paper, we show how a dimension reduction algorithm can unveil hidden patterns in US census data and consistently yield useful insights into the type...

Ricardian theories of production often take the comparative advantage of locations in diff erent industries to be uncorrelated. They are seen as the outcome of the realization of a random extreme value distribution. These theories do not take a stance regarding the counterfactual or implied...

When local cost discovery generates knowledge spillovers, specialization patterns become partly indeterminate and the mix of goods that a country produces may have important implications for economic growth. We demonstrate this proposition formally and adduce some empirical support for it. We...

In the presence of uncertainty about what a country can be good at producing, there can be great social value to discovering costs of domestic activities because such discoveries can be easily imitated. We develop a general-equilibrium framework for a small open economy to clarify the analytical...