The results of this paper complement the recent findings of real exchange rates as stationary processes. The standard procedure of applying a battery of unit root tests can be problematic since the tests are sensitive to the specifics of the time-series process. The novelty of the approach we...

This paper examines growth in output per person in 17 OECD countries from the late nineteenth century to 1989 considering the possibility of several breaks in trend. In all cases the unit root hypothesis is rejected in favour of a segmented trend stationary alternative. 1951-73 is shown to be an...

There has been serious suspicion of a spurious rejection of the unit roots in panel studies of PPP due to the failure to control for cross-sectional dependence. This article presents evidence of mean-reversion in industrial country real exchange rates in a set up that accounts naturally for...

The drift-adjustment method estimates the expected rate of depreciation within an exchange rate band by simple equations. Papers applying this method claim that, while forecasting a freely floating currency is hopeless, predicting an exchange rate within the future band is successful. This paper...

The convergence hypothesis has generated a huge empirical literature: this paper critically reviews some of the earlier key findings, clarifies their implications, and relates them to more recent results. Particular attention is devoted to interpreting convergence empirics. The main findings...

Several papers that make forecasts about the long-term impact of the current financial crisis rely on models in which there is only one type of financial crisis. These models tend to predict that the current crisis will have long lasting negative effects on economic growth. This paper points out...

Does financial development result in capital being reallocated more rapidly to industries where it is most productive? We argue that if this was the case, financially developed countries should see faster growth in industries with investment opportunities due to global demand and productivity...

We construct estimates of educational attainment for a sample of OECD countries using previously unexploited sources. We follow a heuristic approach to obtain plausible time profiles for attainment levels by removing sharp breaks in the data that seem to reflect changes in classification...

This Paper looks at public sector pay in Britain. We present a novel instrument that exploits the variation in public sector status across individuals arising from the privatisation programme of the 1990s. We show formally that results that are estimated may thereby be robust to self-selection...

Existing empirical estimates of US nationwide tax multipliers vary from close to zero to very large. Using narrative measures as proxies for structural shocks to total tax revenues in an SVAR, we estimate tax multipliers at the higher end of the range: around two on impact and up to three after...