This paper examines the impact on TFP of North-South trade-related technology diffusion in Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC). North-South R&D flows are constructed based on industry-specific R&D in the North, North-South trade patterns, and input-output relations in the South. The main...

This paper investigates the link between health care expenditures and GDP for a sample of 21 OECD countries using recent developed panel cointegration techniques. In contrast to previous studies, the analysis accounts for the fact that health care expenditures are not only determined by income....

This note investigates the effects of the education level, product market rigidities and employment protection legislation on growth. It exploits macro-panel data for OECD countries. For countries close to the technological frontier, education and rigidities are significantly related to TFP...

This paper argues that accounting for the dynamic interactions between endogenous changes in longevity, the education composition of the population, and the associated fertility differential is crucial for understanding the economic and the demographic transition. In the model, heterogeneous...

In this paper we investigate the causal effect of life expectancy on economic growth by explicitly accounting for the role of the demographic transition. In addition to focusing on issues of empirical identification, this paper emphasizes the role of the econometric specification. We present a...

This paper seeks to gain insights on the relationship between growth and unemployment, when considering heterogeneous agents in terms of age. We introduce life cycle features in the endogenous job destruction framework à la Mortensen and Pissarides (1998). We show that, under the assumption of...

Economic development in Latin America has trailed most other world regions over the past four decades despite its relatively high initial development and school attainment levels. This puzzle can be resolved by considering the actual learning as expressed in tests of cognitive skills, on which...

We investigate whether a causal interpretation of the robust association between cognitive skills and economic growth is appropriate and whether cross-country evidence supports a case for the economic benefits of effective school policy. We develop a new common metric that allows tracking...

In contrast to the very large literature on skill-biased technical change among workers, there is hardly any work on the importance of skills for the entrepreneurs who employ those workers, and in particular on their evolution over time. This paper proposes a simple theory of skill-biased change...

This paper provides estimates of the economic impact of non-communicable diseases (NCDs) in China and India for the period 2012-2030. Our estimates are derived using WHO's EPIC model of economic growth, which focuses on the negative effects of NCDs on labor supply and capital accumulation. We...