This paper considers the effects of fiscal and financial policy on economic growth in open and closed economies, when human capital formation by young households is constrained by the illiquidity of human wealth. Both endogenous and exogenous growth versions of the basic OLG model are analysed....

We document an empirical relationship between the cross-country adoption of technologies and the degree of long-term historical relatedness between human populations. Historical relatedness is measured using genetic distance, a measure of the time since two populations’ last common ancestors....

To study the short-run and long-run implications on wage inequality, we introduce directed technical change into a Ricardian model of offshoring. A unique final good is produced by combining a skilled and an unskilled product, each produced from a continuum of intermediates (tasks). Some of...

This paper evaluates the global welfare impact of China's trade integration and technological change in a multi-country quantitative Ricardian-Heckscher-Ohlin model. We simulate two alternative growth scenarios: a "balanced" one in which China's productivity grows at the same rate in each...

This paper builds a two-country (North, South), two-sector (polluting, nonpolluting) trade model with directed technical change, examining whether unilateral environmental policies can ensure sustainable growth. The polluting good is produced with a clean and a dirty input. I show that a...

We construct and estimate a unified model combining three of the main sources of cross-country income disparities: differences in factor endowments, barriers to technology adoption and the inappropriateness of frontier technologies to local conditions. The key components are different types of...

We revisit the debt overhang question. We first use non-parametric techniques to isolate a panel of countries on the downward sloping section of a debt Laffer curve. In particular, overhang countries are ones where a threshold level of debt is reached in sample, beyond which (initial) debt ends...

Foreign exchange windfalls such as those from natural resource revenues change non-resource exports, imports, and the capital account. We study the balance between these responses and, using data on 41 resource exporters for 1970-2006, show that the response to a dollar of resource revenue is,...

We use variation in oil output among Brazilian municipalities to investigate the effects of resource windfalls. We find muted effects of oil through market channels: offshore oil has no effect on municipal non-oil GDP or its composition, while onshore oil has only modest effects on non-oil GDP...

This Paper analyses the welfare benefits from falling relative prices of IT (Information Technology) goods across a wide range of countries. Using two separate methodologies and datasets, we find that welfare benefits mainly accrue to users of IT, not their producers, because of falling relative...