This Selected Issues paper for Chile describes the postcrisis recovery experience. The recovery from the 2008–2009 global crisis has been markedly different both among advanced and emerging economies. The steady improvement in the labor wedge-distortions related to the consumption leisure...

This Selected Issues paper studies Luxembourg’s economic growth performance of the past two decades with a view to shedding light on the growth prospects and fiscal implications. The paper investigates whether the recent weakness in activity is largely transitory or whether it heralds a...

We investigate sources of economic fluctuations in Chile during 1998-2007 within the framework of a standard neoclassical growth model with time-varying frictions (wedges). We analyze the relative importance of efficiency, labor, investment, and government/trade wedges for business cycles in...

This paper studies the impact of the level and volatility of the commodity terms of trade on economic growth, as well as on the three main growth channels: total factor productivity, physical capital accumulation, and human capital acquisition. We use the standard system GMM approach as well as...

The paper investigates how changes in industries' funding costs affect total factor productivity (TFP) growth. Based on panel regressions using 31 U.S. and Canadian industries between 1991 and 2007, and using industries' dependence on external funding as an identification mechanism, we show that...

Financial liberalization has been a controversial issue as there is little empirical evidence for its positive effects on economic growth. However, we find sizable welfare gains, 1 to 28 percent of permanent consumption though, consistent with the literature, the gain in the economic growth is...

This paper reexamines the empirical relationship between financial development and economic growth. It presents evidence based on cross-section and panel data using an updated dataset, a variety of econometric methods, and two standard measures of financial development: the level of liquid...

In the spirit of what is known as business cycle accounting, this paper finds that the investment wedge-the gap between household's rate of intertemporal substitution and the marginal product of capital-is large and quantitatively significant in explaining China's and India's growth. Specific...

This paper evaluates what type of models can account for the recent episodes of output drops in Latin America. I develop an open economy version of the business cycle accounting methodology (Chari, Kehoe, and McGrattan, 2007) in which output fluctuations are decomposed into four sources: total...

This paper provides a quantitative assessment of the impact of economic growth in the United States on growth in other countries. Using panel data estimation, the paper finds a significant positive impact of U.S. growth on growth in the rest of the world, especially developing countries, during...