What determines the technology that a country adopts? While many factors affect technological adoption, the efficiency of the country's financial system may also play a significant role. To address this question, a dynamic contract model is embedded into a general equilibrium setting with...

We study a period of severe disequilibrium to investigate whether board characteristics are related to corporate investment, debt usage, and firm value. During the 1930-1938 Depression era, when the corporate sector was shocked by an unprecedented downturn, we document a relation between board...

Unlike economies as a whole, manufacturing industries exhibit unconditional convergence in labor productivity. The paper documents this finding for 4-digit manufacturing sectors for a large group of developed and developing countries over the period since 1990. The coefficient of unconditional...

Between 1870 and 1913, economic convergence among present OECD members (or even a wider sample of countries) was dramatic, about as dramatic as it has been over the past century and a half. The convergence can be documented in GDP per worker-hour, GDP per capita and in real wages. What were the...

Economists devote too much attention to international flows of goods and services and not enough to international flows of ideas. Traditional trade flows are an imperfect substitute for flows of the underlying ideas. The simplest textbook trade model shows that a welfare-enhancing move toward...

This paper addresses the interactions between globalization, the quality of democracy, and economic convergence using simultaneous estimation techniques. To reflect process, we use multi-dimensional, de facto, and continuous measures of democracy and globalization. To reflect context, as defined...

W. Arthur Lewis argued that a new international economic order emerged between 1870 and 1913, and that global terms of trade forces produced rising primary product specialization and de-industrialization in the poor periphery. More recently, modern economists argue that volatility reduces growth...