Recent literature has emphasized the importance of transport costs and infrastructure in explaining trade, access to markets, and increases in per capita income. For most Latin American countries, transport costs are a greater barrier to U.S. markets than import tariffs. We investigate the...

This paper studies the pattern of allocation of foreign aid from various donors to receiving countries. We find considerable evidence that the direction of foreign aid is dictated by political and strategic considerations, much more than by the economic needs and policy performance of the...

Based on a survey that we designed and that covers a stratified random sample of 12,400 firms in 120 cities in China with firm-level accounting information for 2002-2004, this paper examines the presence of systematic distortions in capital allocation that result in uneven marginal returns to...

China presents several macroeconomic patterns that appear inconsistent with standard stylized facts about economic development and hence inconsistent with the standard neoclassical growth model. We show that Chinese macroeconomic patterns instead appear consistent with an environment where state...

Using pooled cross-section, time-series data for 44 industries over the decades of the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s in the United States, I find no econometric evidence that computer investment is positively linked to TFP growth (over and above its inclusion in the TFP measure). However,...

We estimate the level and distribution of global household wealth. The levels of assets and debts for 39 countries are measured using household balance sheet and survey data centred on the year 2000. The determinants of mean financial assets, non-financial assets, and liabilities are studied...

Growth and structural transformation of the manufacturing sector in developing countries are generally considered to be the result of the expansion of the "modem" (large-scale) sector relative to the "traditional" (small-scale) sector. Examining the sources of labor productivity growth in...

The educational screening hypothesis states that beyond a certain point schooling functions as a signaling device to identify pre-existing talents. We test for the presence of screening by comparing the schooling and earnings of self-employed workers and of those employed by others in a sample...

Though the statistical techniques vary, the matching problem is essentially the same in each case and can be stated formally as follows: Given "observations on X,Y from one sample and on X,Z from another sample, when will it be true that by matching observations according to X, an artificial Y,Z...

This paper examines the impact of the operations of foreign-owned multinational firms on the productivity growth of Mexican manufacturing industries, 1965-1984. It investigates both the extent to which the penetration of a sector by foreign-owned firms affects the productivity of local firms in...