"Estimations of the size and development of the shadow economy for 145 countries, including developing, transition and highly developed OECD economies over the period 1999 to 2003 are presented. The average size of the shadow economy (as a percent of "official" GDP) in 2002/03 in 96 developing...

This paper introduces a novel approach for dealing with the 'curse of dimensionality' in the case of large linear dynamic systems. Restrictions on the coefficients of an unrestricted VAR are proposed that are binding only in a limit as the number of endogenous variables tends to infinity. It is...

This paper seeks to gain insights on the relationship between growth and unemployment, when considering heterogeneous agents in terms of age. We introduce life cycle features in the endogenous job destruction framework à la Mortensen and Pissarides (1998). We show that, under the assumption of...

This paper is dedicated to the empirical exploration of the welfare effect of expectations and progress per se. Using ten waves of the Russian Longitudinal Monitoring Survey, a panel household survey rich in subjective variables, the analysis suggests that for a given total stock of...

In this paper we investigate the causal effect of life expectancy on economic growth by explicitly accounting for the role of the demographic transition. In addition to focusing on issues of empirical identification, this paper emphasizes the role of the econometric specification. We present a...

This paper argues that accounting for the dynamic interactions between endogenous changes in longevity, the education composition of the population, and the associated fertility differential is crucial for understanding the economic and the demographic transition. In the model, heterogeneous...

In contrast to the very large literature on skill-biased technical change among workers, there is hardly any work on the importance of skills for the entrepreneurs who employ those workers, and in particular on their evolution over time. This paper proposes a simple theory of skill-biased change...

This paper constructs a two-period overlapping generations model of human capital investment decisions where a microloan program designed to finance entrepreneurial activities is active. It is shown that, in the presence of human capital externalities (social returns to education) there exists a...

This paper develops a two-sector model that illuminates the role played by agricultural modernization in the transition from stagnation to growth. When agriculture relies on traditional technology, industrial development reduces the relative price of industrial products, but has a limited effect...