This paper presents a stylized model of international trade and asset price bubbles. Its central insight is that bubbles tend to appear and expand in countries where productivity is low relative to the rest of the world. These bubbles absorb local savings, eliminating inefficient investments and...

This paper shows that an open economy Solow model provides a good description of international investment positions in industrialized countries. More than half of the variation of net foreign assets in the 1990's can be attributed to cross country differences in the savings rate, population and...

Investment in machinery is a key aspect in the analysis of long-term economic growth during the era of the spread of industrialisation. But, historiography has only revealed what the pace of capital accumulation was in a few Latin American economies. This article offers continuous (annual) and...

Estimates for the U.S. suggest that at least in some sectors productivity enhancing reallocation is the dominant factor in accounting for producitivity growth. An open question, particularly relevant for developing countries, is whether reallocation is always productivity enhancing. It may be...

This paper evaluates the global welfare impact of China's trade integration and technological change in a multi-country quantitative Ricardian-Heckscher-Ohlin model. We simulate two alternative growth scenarios: a "balanced" one in which China's productivity grows at the same rate in each...

In 2007, countries in the euro periphery were enjoying stable growth, low deficits, and low spreads. Then the financial crisis erupted and pushed them into deep recessions, raising their deficits and debt levels. By 2010, they were facing severe debt problems. Spreads increased and,...

We study the short- and long-run implications of offshoring on innovation, technology adoption, wage and income inequality in a Ricardian model with directed technical change. In our model, profit maximization determines both the extent of offshoring and the direction of technological progress....

We study the effects of the adoption of new agricultural technologies on structural transformation. To guide empirical work, we present a simple model where the effect of agricultural productivity on industrial development depends on the factor bias of technical change. We test the predictions...

We find that trade and domestic market size are robust determinants of economic growth over the 1960-1996 period when trade openness is measured as the US dollar value of imports and exports relative to GDP in PPP US$ ('real openness'). When trade openness is measured as the US dollar value of...

During the last few decades, many emerging markets have lifted restrictions on cross-border financial transactions. The conventional view was that this would allow these countries to: (i) receive capital inflows from advanced countries that would finance higher investment and growth; (ii) insure...