We estimate the relative roles of factor inputs and productivity in explaining the level of economic development, which is measured as output per worker. For a large sample of countries, we show that alternative identifying productivity assumptions and alternative measures of human capital have...

The paper suggests that international differences in educational institutions explain the large international differences in student performance in cognitive achievement tests. A microeconometric student-level estimation based on data for more than 260,000 students from 39 countries reveals that...

Based on Baumol’s cost-disease model, we develop two alternative measures of the change in the productivity of schooling. Both productivity measures are based on changes in the relative price of schooling. We find that in most OECD countries the price of schooling has increased faster in...

New evidence confirms the conclusion of former surveys that the link between school resources and student performance is generally missing in educational production. While the conventional within-country cross-section evidence remains controversial, recent contributions which control for...

We employ a combination of school fixed effects and IV estimation to estimate the effect of class size on student performance in 18 countries. Using the random part of the class-size variation between two adjacent grades within individual schools allows us to identify causal class-size effects....

Official (government-to-government) lending is much larger than commonly known, often surpassing total private cross-border capital flows, especially during disasters such as wars, financial crises and natural catastrophes. We assemble the first comprehensive long-run dataset of official...

We study sovereign external debt crises over the past 200 years, with a focus on creditor losses, or "haircuts". Our sample covers 327 sovereign debt restructurings with external private creditors over 205 default spells since 1815. Creditor losses vary widely (from none to 100%), but the...

This paper shows that China has launched a new global system for cross-border rescue lending to countries in debt distress. We build the first comprehensive dataset on China’s overseas bailouts between 2000 and 2021 and provide new insights into China’s growing role in the global financial...