Paths into the Asian Crisis of 1997-98 and the recent global financial crisis were similar, but the roads out could not be more different. Common wisdom has it that on impact Asia endured fiscal austerity imposed by the IMF whereas the IMF recommended stimulus in the case of the advanced nations...

Capital deepening (at least to the extent this can be measured) accounts for a large share of the variations in performance; increasingly during the past 25 years, this has meant ICT capital deepening. However, the capital contribution to growth varies considerably over time and across the four...

Starting from the same level of productivity and per-capita income as the United States in the mid-nineteenth century, Europe fell behind steadily to a level of barely half in 1950, and then began a rapid catch-up. While Europe's level of productivity has almost converged, its income per person...

After fifty years of catching up to the United States level of productivity, since 1995 Europe has been falling behind. The growth rate in output per hour over 1995-2003 in Europe was just half that in the United States, and this annual growth shortfall caused the level of European productivity...

After three years of near stagnation, the mood in Europe is definitely gloomy. Many doubt that the European model has a future. In this paper, I argue that things are not so bad, and there is room for optimism. Over the last thirty years, productivity growth has been much higher in Europe than...

We argue that unmeasured investments in intangible organizational capital associated with the role of information and communications technology (ICT) as a general purpose technology' can explain the divergent U.S. and U.K. TFP performance after 1995. GPT stories suggest that measured TFP should...

European economic growth has been weak, compared to the US, since the 80s. In previous work (Krueger and Kumar, 2003), we argued that the European focus on specialized, vocational education might have been effective during the 60s and 70s, but resulted in a growth gap relative to the US during...

In this paper, we develop a model of technology adoption and economic growth in which households optimally obtain either a concept-based, general' education or a skill-specific, vocational' education. General education is more costly to obtain, but enables workers to operate new technologies...

We take a first pass at quantifying the magnitudes of debt relief achieved through default and restructuring in two distinct samples: 1979-2010, focusing on credit events in emerging markets, and 1920-1939, documenting the official debt hangover in advanced economies that was created by World...

Several alternative measures of "effective" exchange rates are discussed in the context of their theoretical underpinnings and actual construction. Focusing on contemporary indices and recently developed econometric methods, the empirical characteristics of these differing series are examined,...