This work offers non-residential capital stock estimation for major Latin American economies – Argentina, Brazil, Chile and Mexico - made towards a homogeneous method. This work covers the whole twentieth century and the years of the XXI century, expanding backward half century the present...

The view of a 1870-1913 expanding European economy providing increasing welfare to everybody has been challenged by many, then and now. We focus on the amazing growth that was experienced, its diffusion and its sources, in the context of the permanent competition among European nation states....

Many factors inhibiting and facilitating economic growth have been suggested. Can agnostics rely on international income data to tell them which matter? We find that agnostic priors lead to conclusions that are sensitive to differences across available income estimates. For example, the PWT 6.2...

The well-known lack of power of unit root tests has often been attributed to the short length of macroeconomic variables and also to DGP’s that depart from the I(1)-I(0) alternatives. This paper shows that by using long spans of annual real GNP and GNP per capita (133 years) high power can be...

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...

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...

The paper defines concepts of real wealth and saving which take into account the intertemporal index number problem that results from changing interest rates. Unlike conventional measures of real wealth, which are based on the market value of assets and ignore the index number problem, the new...

According to the Taylor principle a central bank should adjust the nominal interest rate by more than one-for-one in response to changes in current inflation. Most of the existing literature supports the view that by following this simple recommendation a central bank can avoid being a source of...

The present paper revisits an old theme in Latin American and Chilean economic history; the early industrialization in the XIX - XX centuries. The difference with previous approaches is the elaboration of new quantitative series of Chilean machinery investment in the long run and its relative...

This paper studies the macroeconomic implications of firms' investment composition choices in the presence of credit constraints. Following a negative and persistent aggregate productivity shock, firms shift into short-term investments because they produce more pledgeable output and because they...