Using a matched employer-employee data set of manufacturing plants in three sub-Saharan countries, I compare the marginal productivity of different categories of workers with the wages they earn. A methodological contribution is to estimate the firm level production function jointly with the...

This study focuses on the role of trade and trade policy in achieving sustained long-term growth in Africa. One major conclusion is that trade policy in Sub-Saharan Africa works much the same way that it does elsewhere. High levels of trade restrictions have been an important obstacle to exports...

We study the impact of model disagreement on the dynamics of asset prices, return volatility, and trade in the market. In our continuous-time framework, two investors have homogeneous preferences and equal access to information, but disagree about the length of the business cycle. We show that...

What is the impact of time-varying business uncertainty on economic activity? Using partly confidential business survey data from the U.S. and Germany in structural VARs, we find that positive innovations to business uncertainty lead to prolonged declines in economic activity. In contrast, their...

Each quarter since 1968 the National Bureau of Economic Research, in collaboration with the American Statistical Association, has been collecting a large amount of information on the record of forecasting in the U. S. economy. This paper is a progress report on a comprehensive study of the...

Using a matched employer-employee data set of manufacturing plants in three sub-Saharan countries, I compare the marginal productivity of different categories of workers with the wages they earn. Under certain conditions, the wage premiums for worker characteristics should equal the productivity...

This paper develops a decision-theoretic approach to policy analysis. We argue that policy evaluation should be conducted on the basis of two factors: the policymaker's preferences, and the conditional distribution of the outcomes of interest given a policy and available information. From this...

Proponents of trade liberalization argue that it will force firms to produce closer to the production possibility frontier and that the frontier will move out faster. In particular, plants that export will achieve a higher productivity level. However intuitive the argument, empirical evidence is...

The dismal growth performance of Africa is the worst economic tragedy of the XXth century. We document the evolution of per capita GDP for the continent as a whole and for subset of countries south of the Sahara desert. We document the worsening of various income inequality indexes and we...

Previous work has claimed that monopoly power facilitates the provision of credit, since monopolists are better able to enforce payment. Here, we argue that if relationship-specific investments are required by borrowers to establish creditworthiness, monopoly power may reduce credit provision...