A central issue in the growth literature is whether initial conditions matter for income disparity among nations. If they don't, then countries will converge to a single regime once the structural features of the economies are controlled for. If they do, then countries will converge to multiple...

This dissertation makes a contribution to regional studies by constructing Multi-Factor Productivity (MFP) growth measures at the state level for the US. The first essay of the dissertation exploits a dual growth accounting technique to calculate sector-specific MFP growth for all US states from...

The Kisan Credit Card (KCC) scheme was introduced in India in 1998-1999 and has since become a flagship programme providing access to short-term credit in the agricultural sector. According to the Government of India, over a 100 million cards had been issued cumulatively by March 2011. Using...

One of the major challenges of empirical tax research is the identification and calculation of appropriate tax data. While there is consensus that average marginal tax rates are most suitable for studying the effects of tax policy on economic growth, due to data limitations the calculation of...

This paper estimates the magnitudes of government spending and tax multipliers within a regime-switching framework for the U.S economy during the period 1949:1- 2006:4. Our results show that the magnitudes of spending multipliers are larger during periods of low economic activity, while the...