Expanded international data from the PIAAC survey of adult skills allow us to analyze potential sources of the cross-country variation of comparably estimated labor-market returns to skills in a more diverse set of 32 countries. Returns to skills are systematically larger in countries that have...

How do economic policies and institutions affect job reallocation processes and their consequences for productivity growth? This paper studies the extreme case of economic system change and alternative transitional policies in the former Soviet Republics of Russia and Ukraine. Exploiting annual...

Many countries in the developed world are ageing in terms of their distribution of population. Conversely, a number of countries in the south have younger population. India for example, has 60% of its population in the age group of 15-59, with the mean age close to 27 years as of present times....

This paper examines the drivers of the long-run structural transformation in Japan. We use a dynamic input-output framework that decomposes the reallocation of the total output across sectors into two components: the Engel effect (demand side) and the Baumol effect (supply side). To perform this...

There is a growing body of literature exploring the skill content of jobs. This paper contributes to this research by using data on the task content of occupations in developing countries, instead of U.S. data, as most existing studies do. The paper finds that indexes based on U.S. data do not...

The use of e-commerce around the world has accelerated in recent years, with Asia, led by China, spearheading the rise. Using cross-country enterprise survey data, this paper shows that firms engaged in e-commerce have higher productivity and generate a larger share of their revenues from...

The legacy of non-performing loans and high opportunity cost of government financing of bank recapitalization impeded the efficiency of financial intermediation and are an important policy issue in Vietnam. This paper presents a theoretical and empirical analysis of the issue. An empirical...

In the last few decades, real GDP growth and investment in advanced countries have declined in tandem. This slowdown was not the result of weak demand (there has been no shift along the Okun curve), but of a decline in potential output growth (which has shifted the Okun curve to the left). We...