We quantify the role of financial frictions and the initial misallocation of resources in explaining development dynamics. Following a reform that triggers efficient reallocation of resources, our model economy with financial frictions converges slowly to the new steady state--it takes twice as...

It is well understood that investment serves as a shock absorber at the time of crisis. The duration of the drag on investment, however, is perplexing. For the nine Asian economies we focus on in this study, average investment/GDP is about 6 percentage points lower during 1998-2012 than its...

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...

Since 1950, the economies of East Asia grew rapidly but received little inter-national capital, while Latin America received considerable international capitaleven as their economies stagnated. The literature typically explains the failureof capital to flow to high growth regions as resulting...

This paper develops an interpretation of the Asian meltdown focused on moral hazard as the common source of overinvestment, excessive external borrowing, and current account deficits. To the extent that foreign creditors are willing to lend to domestic agents against future bail-out revenue from...

The dismal growth performance of Africa is the worst economic tragedy of the XXth century. We document the evolution of per capita GDP for the continent as a whole and for subset of countries south of the Sahara desert. We document the worsening of various income inequality indexes and we...

We document regularities in the distribution of relative incomes and patterns of investment in countries and over time. We develop a quantitative version of the neoclassical growth model with a broad measure of capital in which investment decisions are affected by distortions. These distortions...

We study the impacts of a rural development program designed to boost the income of the smallfarm sector in Nicaragua. Exploiting the random assignment of treatment, we find statistically and economically significant impacts on gross farm income and investment in productive farm capital. Using...

We survey three distinct types of financial crises which took place in the 1990s and the 2000s: 1) the credit implosion leading to severe banking crisis in Japan; 2) The foreign reserves' meltdown triggered by foreign hot money flight from frothy economies with fixed exchange rate regimes of...

This paper uses a unique dataset to study how firms managed liquidity during the financial crisis. Our analysis provides new insights on the interactions between internal liquidity, external funds, and real corporate decisions, such as investment and employment. We first describe how companies...