This paper examines the impact of education, trade, governance and distance on technology diffusion and TFP in Latin America – specifically South America and Mexico (SAM) – and East Asia, over the 32 years preceding the Great Recession (1976–2007). Findings are: i) TFP rises with...

This paper explores the impact of financial liberalization on the migration of high skilled labor from 46 countries to the OECD, taken at five year intervals over the period 1985-2000. Using an exploratory factor analysis, we are able to distinguish between two dimensions of financial...

This paper presents a comparative overview of mobility patterns in 14 Latin American countries between 1992 and 2003. Using three alternative econometric techniques on constructed pseudo-panels, the paper provides a set of estimators for the traditional notion of income mobility as well as for...

Economic theory has identified a number of channels through which openness to international financial flows could raise productivity growth. However, while there is a vast empirical literature analyzing the impact of financial openness on output growth, far less attention has been paid to its...

Education, general health, and reproductive health are key indicators of human development. Investments in these domains can also promote economic growth. This paper argues for the importance of human development related investments based on i) a theoretical economic growth model with poverty...

Economic development in Latin America has trailed most other world regions over the past four decades despite its relatively high initial development and school attainment levels. This puzzle can be resolved by considering the actual learning as expressed in tests of cognitive skills, on which...

In many developing countries, the supply of skilled workers is likely to continue to be stronger than demand, and this should drive down the skill premium and reduce inequality. Within the limitations of any exercise based on simulations, this paper finds that the recently observed reduction in...

Using newly collected national and sub-national data and historical case studies, this paper argues that differences in innovative capacity, captured by the density of engineers at the dawn of the Second Industrial Revolution, are important to explaining present income differences, and, in...