This note addresses some issues that arise when using 'normalized' CES production functions, an approach that has become popular in the literature. The results of Klump and de La Grandville (2000) provide a simple way to calibrate the parameters of the CES production function when the necessary...

The remarkable economic success of the United States in the 1990s led many observers to talk about a "New Economy". This paper provides an overview of the main issues, including faster productivity growth, the stability of inflation despite very low unemployment, the reduction in output...

This paper analyzes several aspects of convergence behaviour in the Solow growth model. In empirical work, a popular approach is to log-linearize around the steady-state. We investigate the conditions under which this approximation performs well, and discuss convergence behaviour when an economy...

The economic boom of the USA in the 1990s was remarkable in its duration, the sustained rise in equipment investment, the reduced volatility of productivity growth, and continued uncertainty about the trend growth rate. In this paper we link these phenomena using an extension of the classic...

In middle-income countries, the informal sector often accounts for a substantial fraction of urban employment. We develop a general equilibrium model with matching frictions in the urban labour market, the possibility of self-employment in the informal sector, and scope for rural-urban...

Several recent papers have argued that trade and financial development may be linked, either for political economy reasons, or because foreign competition and exposure to shocks lead to changes in the demand for external finance. In this paper we use the cross-country and time-series variation...

This paper shows how to calibrate a two-sector general equilibrium model of production using a small number of parameter assumptions and readily available data. The framework is then used to analyze the costs of labor market dualism. The paper quantiÞes the effects of rural-urban wage...

We examine the view that high-quality macroeconomic policy is a necessary, but not sufficient, condition for economic growth. We first construct a new index of the quality of macroeconomic policy. We then directly compare growth rate distributions across countries with good and bad policies; use...

This paper argues that dual economy models deserve a central place in the analysis of growth in developing countries. The paper shows how these models can be used to analyze the output losses associated with factor mis-allocation, aggregate growth in the presence of factor market distortions,...

This paper presents necessary and sufficient conditions for unambiguous changes in wage inequality in a dual economy, based on analysis of the entire Lorenz curve. These conditions are then used to analyze the distributional consequences of various types of economic growth. In particular, it is...