The latest World Bank estimates of real GDP per capita for China are significantly lower than previous ones.  We review possible sources of this puzzle and conclude that it reflects a combination of factors, including substitution bias in consumption, reliance on urban prices which we estimate...

Characteristics models have been found to be useful in many areas of economics. However, their empirical implementation tends to rely heavily on functional form assumptions. In this paper we develop a revealed preference approach to characteristics models. We derive the necessary and sufficient...

Existing methods of reconstructing historical Euro-zone data by aggregation of the individual countries’ data raises numerous difficulties due to past exchange rate changes. The approach proposed here is designed to avoid such distortions, and aggregate exactly when exchange rates are...

The labour productivity differentials between manufacturing firms in Ghana and South Korea exceed those implied by macro analysis.  Median value-added per employee is nearly 40 times higher in South Korea than Ghana.  The most important single factor in explaining this difference is the...

Suppose we observe a finite number of input decisions made by a firm, as well as the prices at which those inputs were acquired.  What conditions on the set of observations are necessary and sufficient for it to be consistent with a firm choosing inputs to maximize profit, subject to a...

This paper surveys the most popular parametric and semi-parametric estimators for Cobb-Douglas production functions arising from the econometric literature of the past two decades. We focus on the different approaches dealing with 'transmission bias' in firm-level studies, which arises from...

Interconnections among financial institutions create potential channels for contagionand amplification of shocks to the financial system. Contagion occurs when a shock tothe assets of a single firm causes other firms to default through the network of obligations.We say that contagion is weak if...

List prices are not completely credible as take it or leave it prices: buyers are able to seek reductions by bargaining with firms. We show that this realisation leads to the existence of a critical threshold number of competitors in an industry which depends on fundamentals. In industries with...

This paper analyses the implications of bargaining between buyers and sellers on the competitive outcome in a homogeneous good industry. Bargaining creates a competitive equilibrium in which some inefficient sellers coexist with efficient ones leading to productivity dispersion. Rival cost...

This paper uses micro data from the Indonesian Census of Manufacturing to analyze the causal relationship between foreign ownership and various aspects of plant performance.  It examines the implications of foreign ownership in three different contexts: entry of foreign investors through...