We revisit Western Europe's record with labor-productivity convergence, and tentatively extrapolate its implications for the future path of Eastern Europe. The poorer Western European countries caught up with the richer ones through both higher rates of physical capital accumulation and greater...

In this paper we examine the main challenges in promoting an effective market economy. While the paper ranges widely across the spectrum of economic institutions and policies, the central theme is the importance of macroeconomic stability for economic growth in the medium and long run....

Interactions between economic development and financial development are studied by looking at the roles of financial institutions in selecting R&D projects (including both imitation and innovation). Financial development is regarded as the evolution of the financing regimes. The effectiveness of...

This article investigates the economics of farm diversification. The analysis assesses economies of diversification using a certainty equivalent measure. It identifies two components: one associated with expected income, and one associated with risk exposure. This integrates two lines of...

Central bank independence is widely thought be a sine qua non of a credible commitment to price stability. The surprise decision by the UK government to grant operational independence to the Bank of England in 1997 affords us a natural experiment with which to gauge the impact on the yield curve...

Part I. Identification and Efficient Estimation: 1. Incredible structural inference Thomas J. Rothenberg; 2. Structural equation models in human behavior genetics Arthur S. Goldberger; 3. Unobserved heterogeneity and estimation of average partial effects Jeffrey M. Wooldridge; 4. On specifying...

The global financial crisis of summer 2008 rocked markets throughout the world. Evidence of its impact on the urban working poor is only just emerging but is likely to be profound. The paper challenges the accepted argument that globalization and economic growth is good for poverty reduction,...

This paper analyzes the relationship between macroeconomic factors and the income distribution using data on equivalized disposable household income from the United Kingdom for 1961–99. We argue in favour of fitting a parametric functional form to the income distribution for each year, and...

Immediately after 1997 the Asian economies were viewed to be catastrophes of financial excess, corporate and political misgovernance, and diminishing returns to over-investment. But they are now freshly restored as the world’s economic powerhouses, just as before the 1997 financial crises they...

A conference titled 'Forecasting in Rio' was held at the Graduate School of Economics of Getulio Vargas Foundation, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, in July 2008 to focus on most recent developments in forecasting. One of the papers presented during the conference was titled, 'Predictability of Stock...