Existing evidence, mostly from British textile industries, rejects the importance of formal education for the Industrial Revolution. We provide new evidence from Prussia, a technological follower, where early-19th-century institutional reforms created the conditions to adopt the exogenously...

This paper explores the dynamics of income and poverty of rural Indian households, 1994-2005. The estimation strategy consists of convergence analysis to test whether poor households are catching-up in terms of income, followed by transition analysis to test whether poor households are more...

This paper uses the BEEPS firm-level data to study the process of convergence of transition countries with developed market economies. The primary focus of the study is on competition and market structure, finance and the structure of lending to firms, and how firms respond to the economic...

This paper examines how firms in an emerging economy are affected by violence due to drug trafficking. Employing rich longitudinal plant-level data covering all of Mexico from 2005 2010, and using an instrumental variable strategy that exploits plausibly exogenous spatiotemporal variation in the...

We compare a set of econometric studies that measure the effect of net internal migration in neoclassical models of long-run real income convergence and derive 67 comparable effect sizes. The precision-weighted estimate of beta convergence is about 2.7%. An increase in the net migration rate of...

In this paper, we provide an overview of the relationship between international migration and international trade as well as capital movements. After taking a brief historical perspective, we first investigate migration flows between two countries in a static, neoclassical context. We allow for...

We measure the effect of lockdown policies on employment and GDP across countries using individual- and sector-level data. Employment effects depend on the ability to work from home, which ranges from about half of total employment in rich countries to around 35% in poor countries. This gap...

This paper is intended to provide an updated discussion on a series of issues that the relevant literature suggests to be crucial in dealing with the challenges a middle income country may encounter in its attempts to further catch-up a higher income status. In particular, the conventional...

We analyze how globalization has affected the sectoral anatomy of regional growth in Germany over the period 1978-2008. The aggregate German economy is characterized by a secular decline of manufacturing and a rise of modern service industries. This trend– also known as Petty's law – is not...