We explore the contribution of product-quality upgrading to the export performance of six fast-growing Asian economies: China, India, Indonesia, Malaysia, South Korea, and Thailand. We focus on measuring the impact of quality upgrading on the changes in these countries' sectoral export shares...

This paper models investment/entry decisions in a competitive industry that is subject to a quantity control on an input for production. The quantity control is implemented by auctioning licenses for the restricted input (e.g., a pollution permit or a production license). The paper shows that...

This paper presents a general equilibrium model of interenterprise arrears, characterized by n-stage production technology with random productivity shocks. The model shows that large interenterprise arrears in transition economies may reflect substantial business risks in those countries and...

Empirically, output and asset returns are highly positively correlated across the United States and the other major industrialized countries. Standard business cycle models that assume flexible prices and wages, in the Real Business Cycle tradition, have great difficulties explaining this fact....

A universal testing and isolation policy is the most viable way to vanquish a pandemic. Its implementation requires: (i) an epidemiological rather than clinical approach to testing, sacrificing accuracy for scalability, convenience and speed; and (ii) state intervention to ramp up production,...

We show empirical evidence that there may not be a tradeoff between market income inequality and high sustained growth, which is key for poverty alleviation. We argue that the economies that achieved high sustained growth and low market income inequality are characterized by dynamism-a drive...

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...

Labor markets in Australia have adjusted smoothly to significant declines in commodity prices with little increase in unemployment. This paper examines several aspects of the adjustment, focusing on (i) evidence of increased labor market frictions following the commodity price decline; (ii)...