In March 2017, the IMF published an upgrade of its Direction of Trade Statistics (DOTS) dataset. This paper documents the new methodology that has been developed to estimate missing observations of bilateral trade statistics on a monthly basis. The new estimation procedure is founded on a...

A growing literature estimates the macroeconomic effect of weather using variations in annual country-level averages of temperature and precipitation. However, averages may not reveal the effects of extreme events that occur at a higher time frequency or higher spatial resolution. To address...

Natural resource revenues provide a valuable source to finance public investment in developing countries, which frequently face borrowing constraints and tax revenue mobilization problems. This paper develops a dynamic stochastic small open economy model to analyze the macroeconomic effects of...

This paper formally identifies an important role of banks: Banks competitively internalize production externalities and facilitate economic growth. I formulate a canonical growth model with externalities as a game among consumers, firms, and banks. Banks compete for deposits to seek monopoly...

The paper discusses the impact and implications of Korean unification by setting up a two-region endogenous growth model. The numerical solutions are based on the formal analytical model, and have been calibrated so that they reflect the observed features of the North and South Korean economies....

This paper examines the extent to which there has been convergence in real per capita incomes across developing countries during the last two decades. In the analysis particular emphasis is placed on the separate roles played by private and public sector investment in determining both the extent...

This paper proposes a model of endogenous economic growth and distribution explicitly incorporating social extraction and political competition, with an application to the Philippine historical experience. The major objective is to explain developments in the distribution of national income and...

This paper provides an explanation for the secular increase in the price of services relative to that of manufactured goods that relies on capital accumulation rather than on an exogenous total factor productivity growth differential. The key assumptions of the two-sector, intertemporal...

Using a newly constructed dataset on trade in services for 192 countries from 1970 to 2014, this paper shows that services currently constitute one-fourth of world trade and an increasingly important component of global production. A detailed analysis of patterns and stylized facts reveals that...

This paper identifies a new mechanism leading to inefficiency in capital reallocation at theextensive margin when an economy experiences a sectoral boom. I argue that imperfectionsin the financial market and capital barriers to entry in the booming sector create amisallocation of managerial...