Expanded international data from the PIAAC survey of adult skills allow us to analyze potential sources of the cross-country variation of comparably estimated labor-market returns to skills in a more diverse set of 32 countries. Returns to skills are systematically larger in countries that have...

How do economic policies and institutions affect job reallocation processes and their consequences for productivity growth? This paper studies the extreme case of economic system change and alternative transitional policies in the former Soviet Republics of Russia and Ukraine. Exploiting annual...

Islamic banks (IBs) have a significant role in the growth of gross domestic product of the developing countries. The Islamic participatory schemes integrate the assets of lenders and borrowers. They allow enable IBs to lend on a longer term basis to create projects with higher risk-return...

This study examines the relationship between crude oil price and financial sector intermediary development in Nigeria over the period 1975-2011, using the autoregressive distributed lag approach to cointegration analysis. Four measures of financial intermediary development are used including an...

The service sector is an avenue for economic transformation as not all countries have a competitive edge in manufacturing. The growing literature on service sector primarily focuses on its development in the US and Europe and on Asian emerging service economies like India. Not as much attention...

This paper examines the dynamic interactions between insurance and economic growth in eight African countries for the period of 1970-2013. Insurance demand is measured by insurance penetration which accounts for income differences across the sample countries. A Bayesian Time Varying Parameter...

This paper estimates the causal impact of tertiary education on luminosity across Indian districts. We address the potential endogeneity of tertiary education using the location of Catholic missionaries in 1911 as an instrument for current tertiary education. We find Catholic missionaries have a...

Recent research has documented a U-shaped industrial concentration curve over an economy's development path. How far can neoclassical trade theory take us in explaining this pattern? We estimate the production side of the Heckscher-Ohlin model using industry data on 44 developed and developing...

The positive association between trade openness and income has been debated over years due to serious estimation flaws prevailing in the cross-country empirical trade literature. The present paper contributes to this debate by re-examining the long-run relationship between trade openness and...

Non-communicable diseases (NCDs) are currently the leading cause of death worldwide. In this paper, we examine the channels through which economic growth affects NCDs' epidemiology. Following a production function approach, we develop a basic technique to break up the impact of economic growth...