The economic history of Argentina presents one of the most dramatic examples of divergence in the modern era. What happened and why? This paper reviews the wide range of competing explanations in the literature and argues that, setting aside deeper social and political determinants, the various...

We extend the standard approach to Bayesian forecast combination by forming the weights for the model averaged forecast from the predictive likelihood rather than the standard marginal likelihood. The use of predictive measures of fit offers greater protection against in-sample overfitting and...

This paper explores the usefulness of bagging methods in forecasting economic time series from linear multiple regression models. We focus on the widely studied question of whether the inclusion of indicators of real economic activity lowers the prediction mean-squared error of forecast models...

Renewed interest in fiscal policy has increased the use of quantitative models to evaluate policy. Because of modeling uncertainty, it is essential that policy evaluations be robust to alternative assumptions. We find that models currently being used in practice to evaluate fiscal policy...

Global supply chains (GSCs) are transforming the world. This paper explores why they emerged, why they are significant and future directions they are likely to take along with some implications for policy. After putting global supply chains into an historical perspective, the paper presents an...

This paper is structured in three parts. The first part outlines the methodological steps, involving both theoretical and empirical work, for assessing whether an observed allocation of resources across countries is efficient. The second part applies the methodology to the long-run allocation of...

In the recent decade, capital outflows from emerging economies, in the form of a demand for liquid assets, have played a key role in the context of global imbalances. In this paper, we model the demand for liquid assets by firms in a dynamic open-economy macroeconomic model. We find that the...

We propose a new, valuation-based measure of world equity market segmentation. While we observe decreased levels of segmentation in many developing countries, the level of segmentation is still significant. In contrast to previous research, we characterize the factors that account for variation...

According to the consensus view in growth and development economics, cross country differences in per-capita income largely reflect differences in countries' total factor productivity. We argue that this view has powerful implications for patterns of capital flows: everything else equal,...

Spain's financial position during the late 19th and early 20th century has usually been presented as one of persistent deficit on current account, which resulted from her integration into international commodity and factor markets and this, in turn, slowed down growth. In this essay a...