During the past two decades, there has been a dramatic change in IPO activity around the world. Though vibrant IPO activity, attributed to better institutions and governance, used to be a strength of the U.S., it no longer is. IPO activity in the U.S. has fallen compared to the rest of the world...

Despite a vast accumulation of private capital, China is not embracing capitalism. Deceptively familiar capitalist features disguise the profoundly unfamiliar foundations of "market socialism with Chinese characteristics." The Chinese Communist Party (CCP), by controlling the career advancement...

We propose a model consistent with two observations. First, the tax rates adopted by different countries are generally uncorrelated with their growth performance. Second, countries that drastically reduce private incentives to invest, severely hurt their growth performance. In our model, the...

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 greater...

Recent writings on China's water situation often portray China's water problems as severe and suggest that water availability could threaten the sustainability of China's future growth. However, China's high growth of the last 20 years or more has been obtained with relatively little increase in...

With US trade and current account deficits approaching 6% of GDP, some have argued that the country is "on the comfortable path to ruin" and that the required "adjustment'' may be painful. We suggest instead that things are fine: although national saving is low, the ratios of household and...

Rebalancing growth patterns of Asian economies is an important component of the overall rebalancing effort that will be required in the world economy. In this paper, I provide an empirical characterization of the composition of GDP levels and growth rates for the key emerging markets and other...

We develop a model of investment with financial constraints and use it to investigate the relation between investment and Tobin's q. A firm is financed partly by insiders, who control its assets, and partly by outside investors. When their wealth is scarce, insiders earn a rate of return higher...

What accounts for differences in output per capita and total factor productivity (TFP) across countries? Empirical evidence points to resource misallocation across heterogeneous production units as an important factor. We study misallocation in a general equilibrium model of establishment...

We formulate a version of the growth model in which production is carried out by heterogeneous plants and calibrate it to US data. In the context of this model we argue that differences in the allocation of resources across heterogeneous plants may be an important factor in accounting for...