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...

We consider a setting in which insiders have information about income that outside shareholders do not, but property rights ensure that outside shareholders can enforce a fair payout. To avoid intervention, insiders report income consistent with outsiders' expectations based on publicly...

In this study, we perform a quantitative assessment of the role of money as an indicator variable for monetary policy in the euro area. We document the magnitude of revisions to euro area-wide data on output, prices and money, and find that monetary aggregates have a potentially significant role...

We use a new sample of UK female identical twins to estimate private economic returns to education. We report findings in three areas. First, we use identical twins, to control for family effects and genetic ability bias, and the education reported by the other twin to control for schooling...

We estimate peer effects for fourth graders in six European countries. The identification relies on variation across classes within schools. We argue that classes within primary schools are formed roughly randomly with respect to family background. Similar to previous studies, we find sizeable...

We estimate scale elasticities in firms' money demand using panel data. Our main data set is a sample of Spanish companies observed over 1983-96. We also analyse comparable UK and US data sets. We find that the errors in money demand equations contain two terms correlated with sales: first, a...

The perpetual inventory method used for the construction of education data per country leads to systematic measurement error. This paper analyses the effect of this measurement error on GDP regressions. There is a systematic difference in the education level between census data and observations...