We revisit Western Europe’s record with labor-productivity convergence, and tentatively extrapolate its implications for the future path of Eastern Europe. The poorer Western European countries caught up with the richer ones through both higher rates of physical capital accumulation and...

We analyse the Generalised Hyperbolic distribution as a model for fat tails and asymmetries in multivariate conditionally heteroskedastic dynamic regression models. We provide a standardised version of this distribution, obtain analytical expressions for the log-likelihood score, and explain how...

Evaluation of forecast optimality in economics and finance has almost exclusively been conducted on the assumption of mean squared error loss under which forecasts should be unbiased and forecast errors serially uncorrelated at the single period horizon with increasing variance as the forecast...

We look into the available macroeconomic figures and the predictions made about the recession in Greece by international organizations, Greek research centers, and the Greek government; and suggest that the predictions regarding the decline in real GDP in recent years were overly optimistic. The...

How big a boost to long run growth can countries expect from the ICT revolution? I use the results of growth accounting and the insights from a two-sector growth model to answer this question. The use of a two-sector rather than a one-sector model is required because of the very rapid rate at...

This paper uses a model of growth and imperfect capital mobility across multiple economies to characterize the dynamics of (cross-country) in- come distributions. This allows convenient study of the convergence hypothesis, and reveals, where appropriate, polarization and clumping within...

This paper studies cross-country patterns of economic growth from the viewpoint of income distribution dynamics. Such a perspective raises new empirical and theoretical issues in growth analysis: the profound empirical regularity is an \emerging twin peaks" in the cross-sectional distribution,...

We present a model that reproduces two salient facts characterizing the international monetary system: i) Faster growing countries are associated with lower net capital inflows and ii) Countries that grow faster accumulate more international reserves and receive more net private inflows. We...

This paper analyzes the welfare benefits from falling relative prices of IT (information technology) goods across a wide range of countries. We find, using two separate methodologies and datasets, that welfare benefits mainly accrue to users of IT, not their producers, because of falling...

This paper presents a model of financial resource curse, i.e. episodes of abundant access to foreign capital coupled with weak productivity growth. We study a two-sector, tradable and non-tradable, small open economy. The tradable sector is the engine of growth, and productivity growth is...