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...

In this paper we distinguish different “qualities” of FDI to re-examine the relationship between FDI and growth. We use ‘quality’ to mean the effect of a unit of FDI on economic growth. However this is difficult to establish because it is a function of many different country and project...

This paper analyses optimal irreversible investment policy when profits are subject to a multiplicative geometric Brownian motion shock. The marginal product of capital is increasing initially and decreasing thereafter. In the latter range, optimal policy is familiar: capacity is added gradually...

This paper studies a dynamic model of a financial market with N strategic agents. Agents receive random stock endowments at each period and trade to share dividend risk. Endowments are the only private information in the model. We find that agents trade slowly even when the time between trades...

The most striking difference in corporate-governance arrangements between rich and poor countries is that the latter rely much more heavily on the dynastic family firm, where ownership and control are passed on from one generation to the other. We argue that if the heir to the family firm has no...

We use a panel of 20 OECD countries over a 30-year period to estimate the implications of international capital mobility for unemployment. We find that the increase in capital flows since the mid1980s has contributed to an amplification of the impulse response of unemployment to country-specific...

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,...