This study seeks to validity of the export-led growth hypothesis using quarterly data from 1980 to 2005. The bounds testing approach to cointegration is employed to test the causal relationship between industrial production, exports and terms of trade. An augmented form of Granger causality...

The volatility of unanticipated output growth in income per capita is detrimental to long-run development, controlling for initial income per capita, population growth, human capital, investment, openness and natural resource dependence. This effect is significant and robust over a wide range of...

Brunnschweiler and Bulte (2008) provide cross-country evidence that the resource curse is a “red herring” once one corrects for endogeneity of resource exports and allows resource abundance affect growth. Their results show that resource exports are no longer significant while the value of...

Are natural resources a “curse” or a “blessing”? The empirical evidence suggests either outcome is possible. The paper surveys a variety of hypotheses and supporting evidence for why some countries benefit and others lose from the presence of natural resources. These include that a...

The Beveridge-Nelson decomposition defines the trend component in terms of the eventual forecast function, as the value the series would take if it were on its long-run path. The paper in-troduces the multistep Beveridge-Nelson decomposition, which arises when the forecast function is obtained...

In this paper we re-evaluate the hypothesis that the development of the financial sector was an essential factor behind economic growth in 19th century Germany. We apply a structural VAR framework to a new annual data set from 1870 to 1912 that was initially recorded by Walther Hoffmann (1965)....

This paper studies the importance of intertemporal substitution in consumption for the cyclical co-movement of consumption, net worth and income. We can largely explain the empirical hump-shaped consumption response to a transitory wealth increase by allowing for time-varying returns in an...

We estimate the steady state growth rate for the Nordic countries using a “knowledge economy” approach. An endogenous growth framework is employed, in which total factor productivity is a function of human capital (measured by average years of education), trade openness, research and...

This paper places the data revision model of Jacobs and van Norden (2011) within a class of trend-cycle decompositions relating directly to the Beveridge-Nelson decomposition. In both these approaches identifying restrictions on the covariance matrix under simple and realistic conditions may...

In the first part of the paper we look at economic growth in Africa over the past three decades. We divide the past three decades into two parts: A "lost period" from 1981 to 1995 and a "recovery period" since the second half of the 1990s. During the first period, Africa did not catch up but...