There exists a persistent disagreement in the literature over the effect of business cycles on economic growth. This paper offers a solution to this disagreement, suggesting that volatility carries a positive direct effect, but also a negative indirect effect, operating through the insurance...

This paper examines fungibility as a possible explanation for the "missing link" between foreign aid and economic growth. The composition of aid plays a crucial role in determining the composition of government spending and, consequently, the magnitude of fungibility and its impact on growth....

We develop a growth model with unemployment due to imperfections in the labor market. In this model, wage inertia and balanced budget rules cause a complementarity between capital and employment capable of explaining the existence of multiple equilibrium paths. Hysteresis is viewed as the result...

This paper investigates the impact of macroeconomic shocks on infant mortality in India and investigates likely mechanisms. A recent OECD-dominated literature shows that mortality at most ages is pro-cyclical but similar analyses for poorer countries are scarce, and both income risk and...

In the neoclassical production functions model technical change (TC) is assumed to be exogenous and it is specified as a function of time. However, some exogenous external factors other than time can also affect the rate of TC. In this paper we model TC via a combination of time trend (purely...

The unemployment rate in Estonia rose sharply in 2010 to one of the highest levels in the EU, after the country entered a severe recession in 2008. While the rate declined relatively rapidly in 2011, it remained high especially for the less educated. In 2009, the Employment Contract Law relaxed...

This paper estimates the effect of minimum wage regulation in 16 OECD countries, 1970-2008. Our treatment is motivated by Neumark and Wascher's (2004) seminal cross-country study using panel methods to estimate minimum wage effects among teenagers and young adults. Apart from the longer time...

This paper compares the poverty reduction impact of income sources, taxes and transfers across five OECD countries. Since the estimation of that impact can depend on the order in which the various income sources are introduced into the analysis, it is done by using the Shapley value. Estimates...

A growing concern on widening income gap between the rich and the poor, the policy mismatch in tackling the relative poverty and income inequality have invited increasing volumes of research focusing on the nexus between equity and efficient growth. Developed countries have experienced the...

In recessions, predominantly men lose their jobs, which has given rise to the term "man-cessions". We analyze whether fiscal expansions bring men back into jobs. To do so, we estimate vector-autoregressive models and identify the effects of fiscal shocks and non-fiscal shocks on the gender...