Most studies of comparative productivities fail to find evidence of convergence in OECD manufacturing despite major economic growth theories predicting convergence. Using manufacturing data for 19 OECD countries over the period from 1870 to 2006 this study finds strong evidence of unconditional...

This paper examines the effect of international patent stock on total factor productivity for 16 OECD countries over the past 120 years. The results show that the international patent stock is highly influential for economic growth and, together with knowledge spillovers through the channel of...

We show the importance of endogenous oil prices and production in the real business cycle framework. Endogenising these variables improves the model's predictions of business cycle statistics, oil related and non-oil related, relative to a situation where either is exogenous. This result is...

We develop nonlinear leading indicator models for GDP growth, with the interest rate spread and growth in M2 as leading indicators. Since policy makers are typically interested in whether or not a recession is imminent, we evaluate these models according to their ability to predict the...

This paper studies the All Ordinaries Index in Australia, and its futures contract known as the Share Price Index. We use a new form of smooth transition model to account for a variety of nonlinearities caused by transaction costs and other market/data imperfections, and given the recent...

This paper studies linear and linear autoregressive leading indicator models of business cycles in OECD countries. The models use the spread between short-term and long-term interest rates as leading indicators for GDP, and their success in capturing business cycles gauged by the non-parametric...

This paper studies linear and nonlinear autoregressive leading indicator models of business cycles in G7 countries. The models use the spread between short-term and long-term interest rates as leading indicators for GDP, and their success in capturing business cycles is gauged by non-parametric...

This paper presents a theory of how factor income shares are determined in an environment with labor market frictions and heterogeneous firms. I assume neither a specific aggregate production function nor competitive factor markets. Instead, I first develop microfoundations for an aggregate...

This paper investigates empirically the Balassa-Samuelson hypothesis (BSH) using annual data over 1970-2008 from 33 countries grouped into developed and developing countries. The innovative feature of our study is that we introduce a new approach for classifying traded and nontraded industries....

In this paper we propose a new test procedure with more general steady state information to test the convergence hypothesis for a specific economy. We consider a model where demeaned per capita output of an economy is a function of time trend and then set the convergence hypothesis as negative...