We use a newly assembled sample of 1,503 regions from 82 countries to compare the speed of per capita income convergence within and across countries. Regional growth is shaped by similar factors as national growth, such as geography and human capital. Regional convergence is about 2.5% per year,...

Conventional wisdom suggests that small businesses are innovative engines of Schumpetarian growth. However, as small businesses, they are likely to face credit rationing in financial markets. If true then policies that promote lending to small businesses may yield substantial economy-wide...

GDP growth is often measured poorly for countries and rarely measured at all for cities or subnational regions. We propose a readily available proxy: satellite data on lights at night. We develop a statistical framework that uses lights growth to augment existing income growth measures, under...

The presence of foreign multinational enterprises may benefit local economies. In particular, highly productive foreign-owned firms may promote technological catch-up of local firms. Such channel of spillovers is defined as "Veblen-Geschenkron" effect of Foreign Direct Investments and is...

We investigate the determinants of regional development using a newly constructed database of 1569 sub-national regions from 110 countries covering 74 percent of the world's surface and 96 percent of its GDP. We combine the cross-regional analysis of geographic, institutional, cultural, and...

We construct and estimate a model that features endogenous growth and technology diffusion. The spillover effects from research and development provide a link between business cycle fluctuations and long-term growth. Therefore, productivity growth is related to the state of the economy. Shocks...

Many water utilities use outdoor watering restrictions based on assigned weekly watering days to promote conservation and delay costly capacity expansions. We find that such policies can lead to unintended consequences - customers who adhere to the prescribed schedule use more water than those...

This paper makes the following original contributions to the literature. (1) We develop a simpler analytical characterization and numerical algorithm for Bayesian inference in structural vector autoregressions that can be used for models that are overidentified, just-identified, or...

We propose a method for solving and estimating linear rational expectations models that exhibit indeterminacy and we provide step-by-step guidelines for implementing this method in the Matlab-based packages Dynare and Gensys. Our method redefines a subset of expectational errors as new...

We consider the problem of short-term time series forecasting (nowcasting) when there are more possible predictors than observations. Our approach combines three Bayesian techniques: Kalman filtering, spike-and-slab regression, and model averaging. We illustrate this approach using search engine...