This paper points to flaws in Gini decompositions by income sources and population subgroups and to common pitfalls in the interpretation of decomposition results, focusing on methods within the framework of Rao (1969). We argue that within this framework Gini elasticities may provide the only...

Financial markets help to foster growth and productivity through their role in mobilizing savings to finance investment and production, selecting and monitoring investment projects, diversifying risks, and allowing investment and production to be carried out in the most productive scale and time...

Recent studies indicate that the natural resource curse, that is, the negative link between resource abundance and growth, may operate through a country’s financial system. Scholars show that resource-abundant economies suffer from lower financial development, which may indirectly affect...

The paper contributes to the ongoing debate on the natural resource curse, which postulates a negative link between natural resource abundance and economic growth. It shows empirically that resource-rich countries appear to have a less developed financial system and investigates a potential...

We consider the problem of regressions with selectively observed covariates in a nonparametric framework. Our approach relies on instrumental variables that explain variation in the latent covariates but have no direct e ffect on selection. The regression function of interest is shown to be a...

The finding that industrial sectors differ in their dependence on external finance for sector-specific technological reasons and, thus, rely to a different degree on financial development has become a major concept in studies conducted on both growth and trade. Although natural resources might...

We analyze the impact of subsidies on R&D expenditures in the financial crisis and beyond. The financial crisis has led to considerable turmoil in financing and, as a result, to restrictions of firms' access to external financing. Utilizing this fact, we identify and analyze financing...

This paper tests for the sensitivity of R&D to financing constraints conditional on restrictions in external financing. Financing constraints of firms are identified by an exogenously calculated rating index. Restrictions in external financing are determined by (i) the specific time period...

In this paper, we analyze the growth effects of historical and biological ancestry, diversity and financial development in transition economies. We show that the common indicators of ethnolinguistic fractionalization, state history and genetic distance yield significant results and to some...

That historical inequality can affect long run macroeconomic performance has been argued by a large literature on endogenous inequality using models of indivisibilities in occupational choice, in the presence of borrowing constraints. These models are characterized by a continuum of steady...