We study how the city system is affected by the possibility for the members of the same cultural diaspora to interact across different cities. In so doing, we propose a simple two-city model with two mobile cultural groups. A localized externality fosters the productivity of individuals when...

Unlike economies as a whole, manufacturing industries exhibit unconditional convergence in labor productivity. The paper documents this finding for 4-digit manufacturing sectors for a large group of developed and developing countries over the period since 1990. The coefficient of unconditional...

The literature has shown that the implied welfare gains from international financial integration are very small. We revisit the existing findings and document that welfare gains can be substantial if capital goods are not perfect substitutes. We use a model of optimal savings that includes a...

We model technological and financial innovation as reflecting the decisions of profit maximizing agents and explore the implications for economic growth. We start with a Schumpeterian endogenous growth model where entrepreneurs earn monopoly profits by inventing better goods and financiers arise...

This paper empirically investigates the effectiveness of competition policy by estimating its impact on Total Factor Productivity (TFP) growth for 22 industries in 12 OECD countries over the period 1995-2005. We find a robust positive and significant effect of competition policy as measured by...

Societies typically have three objectives for work and welfare: sustained income/economic growth per capita, employment growth (and job security?), a just distribution of income along with access to certain basic services. There may be tensions between these objectives. This paper tries to...

We study how barriers to competition - such as, restrictions to business start-up and strict enforcement of covenants or IPR - affect the investment in knowledge capital when contracts are not enforceable. These barriers lower the competition for human capital and reduce the incentive to...

We develop a model of growth driven by successive improvements in `General Purpose Technologies' (GPTs), such as the steam engine, electricity, or micro-electronics. Each new generation of GPTs prompts investments in complementary inputs and impacts the economy after enough such compatible...