This paper brings together several important strands of the econometrics literature: error-correction, cointegration and dynamic factor models. It introduces the Factor-augmented Error Correction Model (FECM), where the factors estimated from a large set of variables in levels are jointly...

East European countries have experienced sharp declines in real GDP since 1990. One of the reasons for this decline is the Soviet trade shock caused by the collapse of the CMEA and of traditional export markets in the Soviet Union. This paper is an attempt to quantify the magnitude of this...

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...

By the end of 1991, Czechoslovakia, Hungary and Poland had achieved a substantial degree of openness to foreign trade. In all three countries, trade is now demonopolized and licensing and quotas play a very small role. Exchange controls have virtually disappeared for current-account...

We consider a model of policy choice in which appropriate policies depend on a country’s own circumstances, but the presence of a successful leader generates an informational externality and results in too little ‘policy experimentation’. Corrupt governments are reined in while honest...

This paper studies the relationship between political conflict and economic growth in a simple model of endogenous growth with distributive conflicts. We study both the case of two `classes' (workers and capitalists) and the case of a continuum distribution of agents, characterized by their...

The 1980s have seen the beginnings of a change of heart among developing country policymakers, as the import-substitution consensus of the previous decade has all but evaporated. It is paradoxical that the 1980s should have become the decade of trade liberalization in LDCs, since this has also...

In late 1979 Turkey found itself in the throes of a foreign exchange crisis, with widespread shortages, negative growth and three-digit inflation. A decade later, Turkey has a comfortable balance-of-payments situation, and holds considerable foreign exchange reserves. The economy has achieved a...

Unlike economies as a whole, manufacturing industries exhibit unconditional convergence in labor productivity. The paper documents this finding for 4-digit manufacturing sectors for a large group of developed and developing countries over the period since 1990. The coefficient of unconditional...

We propose a classical approach to estimate factor-augmented vector autoregressive (FAVAR) models with time variation in the factor loadings, in the factor dynamics, and in the variance-covariance matrix of innovations. When the time-varying FAVAR is estimated using a large quarterly dataset of...