Despite the increasing importance of remittances in total international capital flows, the relationship between remittances and growth has not been adequately studied. This paper studies one of the links between remittances and growth, in particular how local financial sector development...

We use plant output and input prices to decompose the profit margin into four parts: productivity, demand shocks, mark-ups and input costs. We find that each of these market fundamentals are important in explaining plant exit. We then use variation across sectors in tariff changes after the...

This paper develops a long run growth model for a major oil exporting economy and derives conditions under which oil revenues are likely to have a lasting impact. This approach contrasts with the standard literature on the "Dutch disease" and the "resource curse", which primarily focus on short...

Census data from international sources covering 77% of the world's migrant population indicate that the skill composition of migrants in major destination countries, including the US, has been rising over the last four decades. Moreover, the population share of skilled migrants has been...

This paper investigates whether joint economic and political integration leads to larger economic benefits than just economic integration. The identification strategy rests on the fact that Norway, at the time of the 1995 Enlargement of the European Union (EU), had successfully completed...

According to recent UN projections more than 50 percent of the growth in world population over the next half century will be due to population growth in Africa. Given this, any policy that influences African demography will have a significant impact on the world distribution of income. In this...

We use recent immigration data from 195 countries and propose an index of population diversity based on people's birthplaces. This new index is then decomposed into a size (share of foreign born) and a variety (diversity of immigrants) component and is available for 1990 and 2000 disaggregated...

In line with the neoclassical growth model a persistent stream of oil revenues might have a long lasting impact on GDP per capita in oil exporting countries through higher investment activities. This relationship is explored for Iran and the countries of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) using...

We examine the trajectories of the real unit labour costs (RULCs) in a selection of Eurozone economies. Strong asymmetries in the convergence process of the RULCs and its components - real wages, capital intensity, and technology - are uncovered through decomposition and cluster analyses. In the...

This paper presents new estimates of the economic benefits from economic and political integration. Using the synthetic counterfactuals method, we estimate how GDP per capita and labour productivity would have behaved for the countries that joined the European Union (EU) in the 1973, 1980s, 1995...