This paper examines a country's incentives for intellectual property rights (IPR) protection in a global trading environment. There is a time inconsistency problem intrinsic to IPR protection: ex ante strong protection is warranted to promote innovation, but once discovery takes place there is...

Intangible investment is growing as a share of economic activity. We present a simple framework incorporating its distinguishing characteristic of generally greater scalability and lower marginal costs than tangible investment. We show evidence that this may have contributed to more elastic...

This paper synthesizes four lessons from the experiences of six Asian e-money schemes for central banks as they consider adopting central bank digital currency (CBDC): (i) CBDC should embody four attributes: trust, convenience, efficiency, and security; (ii) CBDC service providers can facilitate...

Trade finance is the backbone of international trade for entities ranging from a small businesses to multi-national corporations. An estimated 80 percent of world trade relies on this form of finance (WTO, 2017). Despite its systemic importance and rapid growth, data availability is only...

We exploit a survey data set that contains information on how 11,000 workers across advanced and emerging market economies perceive the main forces shaping the future of work. In general, workers feel more positive than negative about automation, especially in emerging markets. We find that...

Korea is facing mounting economic challenges. Productivity growth has been on a trend decline amid demographic headwinds, while the societal demand for inclusive growth has been on a steep rise. Furthermore, the government-led unbalanced growth model-which served Korea well in the past-has...

Lockdowns imposed around the world to contain the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic arehaving a differential impact on economic activity and jobs. This paper presents a new indexof the feasibility to work from home to investigate what types of jobs are most at risk. Weestimate that over 97.3...

Traditionally, economic growth and business cycles have been treated independently. However, the dependence of GDP levels on its history of shocks, what economists refer to as 'hysteresis,' argues for unifying the analysis of growth and cycles. In this paper, we review the recent empirical and...

It takes many years for more efficient electronic payments to be widely used, and the fees thatmerchants (consumers) pay for using those services are increasing (decreasing) over time. Weaddress these puzzles by studying payments system evolution with a dynamic model in a twosidedmarket setting....

How important is foreign knowledge for domestic innovation outcomes? How is this relation shaped by globalization and the attendant intensification of international competition? Our empirical approach extends the previous literature by analyzing a large panel comprising industries in both...