This paper finds a negative relationship between the employment share of the service sector and the volatility of aggregate output in the OECD — after controlling for the level of financial development. This result reflects volatility differentials across sectors: labor productivity is more...

We estimate the effects on growth of nine fiscal reform episodes in seven high-income countries using the Synthetic Control Method. These episodes are selected using an indicator-based approach applied to the evaluation of growth-friendly fiscal reforms during 1975-2010. We find that in reform...

The main objective of Regional Trade Agreements (RTAs) is to stimulate economic growth in participating countries through increased trade, economies of scale, knowledge and technology transfer. Using a panel data over the period 1979 to 2018, this paper examines the contribution of regional...

The “middle-income trap” is the phenomenon of hitherto rapidly growing economies stagnating at middle-income levels and failing to graduate into the ranks of high-income countries. In this study we examine the middle-income trap as a special case of growth slowdowns, which are identified as...

This paper extends the Schumpeterian model of creative destruction by allowing followers' cost of innovation to increase in their technological distance from the leader. This assumption is motivated by the observation the more technologically advanced the leader is, the harder it is for a...

How important are female workers for economic growth? This paper presents empirical evidence that an increase in female labor force participation is positively associated with labor productivity growth. Using panel data for 10 Canadian provinces over 1990-2015, we found that a 1 percentage point...

This paper empirically assesses the role of structural and institutional reforms in driving productivity growth across countries at different stages of development, using a distance-to-frontier framework. It gauges whether particular policies and reforms matter more for increasing productivity...

Many small middle-income countries (SMICs) in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) have experienced a moderation in growth in recent years. Although factor accumulation, most notably capital deepening, was crucial to the success of many SMICs historically, this growth model appears to have run its course....

This paper provides an empirical benchmarking of growth, productivity and export patterns for developing NREs against other low and middle income developing countries, to inform policy discussions and future analytical work. There is stark heterogeneity in the association of resource sector and...

We study the impact of bank credit on firm productivity. We exploit a matched firm-bankdatabase covering all the credit relationships of Italian corporations, together with a naturalexperiment, to measure idiosyncratic supply-side shocks to credit availability and to estimatea production model...