From the mid-1980s, New Zealand was widely considered to be a leader in liberalising product market regulation (PMR). However, the reform of PMR has lost momentum over recent years. Many areas of PMR are still consistent with best practice, but New Zealand is no longer assessed to be at the...

Industrial specialization has important implications for economic performance; therefore, understanding its determinants is of key policy relevance. This paper quantifies the relationship between factor endowments, policies and institutions and patterns of industrial specialisation in production...

This paper uses an impulse-response function approach to assess the magnitude and persistence of the effects of downturns on labour force participation for a sample of 30 countries over the period 1960-2008. Past severe recessions appear to have had a significant and persistent impact on...

This paper quantifies the importance of different determinants of trade at the industry level using a sample of 54 OECD and non-OECD economies. The empirical methodology extends the approach of previous empirical studies to explicitly quantify the impact that trading partners’ factor...

Using a large panel of OECD countries this paper studies the link between debt and macroeconomic stability by comparing the evolution of balance sheet aggregates and economic output in high- and lowdebt environments. While the relationship between debt and economic growth has been extensively...

Based on an endogenous growth model, we show that intermediate goods markets imperfections can curb incentives to improve productivity downstream. We confirm such prediction by estimating a model of multifactor productivity growth in which the effects of upstream competition vary with distance...

Bayesian Model Averaging techniques are used to analyse how robustly it is possible to identify factors that may lead to the bursting of asset price bubbles in OECD economies. A large set of variables put forward in the literature is assessed, as well as interactions of these variables with...

This paper assesses the importance of taxation on foreign direct investment contributing to the literature in two ways. First, it relates bilateral FDI among OECD countries over the 1990s to a new set of estimates of corporate tax wedges that include many relevant aspects of FDI taxation....

This study investigates the relative importance of factors shaping banking and corporate landscapes in Thailand after 1997 through an empirical analysis of micro-data of Thai banks and firms. The results of the analysis of the bank data show that the deceleration of bank credit growth is mainly...

Health outcomes and the quality of health care in Iceland are very good by international comparison, while income-related health inequality appears to be smaller than in most other countries. However, the health-care system is costly and, according to OECD estimates, public expenditure on health...