This paper analyzes drivers of rising per-pupil public education spending, including Baumol's “cost disease” effect. Higher wages paid to teachers contributed significantly to the increase in per-pupil spending over the past decades. Empirical analyses using a large dataset of advanced and...

German wages have not increased very rapidly in the last decade despite strong employment growth and a 5 percentage point decline in the unemployment rate. Our analysis shows that a large part of the decline in unemployment was structural. Micro-founded Phillips curves fit the German data rather...

This paper takes a fresh look at the determinants of reserves holding with the aim of highlighting similarities and differences in the motives for holding reserves among emerging markets (EMs), advanced economies (AEs), and low-income countries (LICs). We apply two panel estimation techniques:...

This paper computes data-driven correlation networks based on the stock returns of international banks and conducts a comprehensive analysis of their topological properties. We first apply spatial-dependence methods to filter the effects of strong common factors and a thresholding procedure to...

Africa will account for 80 percent of the projected 4 billion increase in the global population by 2100. The accompanying increase in its working age population creates a window of opportunity, which if properly harnessed, can translate into higher growth and yield a demographic dividend. We...

Productivity growth in Italy has been persistently anemic and has lagged that of the euro area over the period 1999-2015, while the indebtedness of its corporate sector has increased. Using the ORBIS firm-level database, this paper studies the long-term impact of persistent corporate-debt...

This paper uses panel data for 19 OECD countries and finds support for the hypothesis that a greater degree of product variety relative to the United States helps to explain relative per capita GDP levels. The empirical work relies upon some direct measures of product variety calculated from...

Would better state institutions increase tax collection, or would higher tax collection help improve state institutions? In the absence of conclusive guidance from theory, this paper searches for an empirical answer to this question, using a panel dataset covering 110 non-resource-rich countries...

Using panel data for a large number of countries, we find that economic contractions are not followed by offsetting fast recoveries. Trend output lost is not regained, on average. Wars, crises, and other negative shocks lead to absolute divergence and lower long-run growth, whereas we find...