What determines firm growth over the life-cycle? Exploiting unique firm panel data on internal organization, balance sheets and innovation, representative of the entire Canadian economy, we study recent theories that examine life-cycle patterns for firm growth. These theories include...

The basic neoclassical growth model accounts well for the postwar cyclical behavior of the U.S. economy prior to the 1990s, provided that variations in population growth, depreciation rates, total factor productivity, and taxes are incorporated. For the 1990s, the model predicts a depressed...

Rosenstein-Rodan (1943) and others posit that rapid development requires a 'big push' -- the coordinated rapid growth of diverse complementary industries, and suggests a role for government in providing such coordination. We argue that Japan's zaibatsu, or pyramidal business groups, provided...

India seems to have followed an idiosyncratic pattern of development, certainly compared to other fast-growing Asian economies. While the emphasis on services rather than manufacturing has been widely noted, within manufacturing India has emphasized skill-intensive rather than labor-intensive...

Both human capital and nonhuman capital play an important role in economic growth. Estimates of nonhuman (physical) capital exist for many more countries than for human capital. Recently there has been a significant increase in the number of countries for which estimates of human capital exist,...

Investment in a broad array of intangible capital - R&D, organizational capital, worker training, and brand equity - has occurred in many of the most advanced world economies and has been found to be an important source of economic growth. This evidence suggests that intangible capital formation...

Recent academic papers have shown that the Japanese sovereign debt situation is not sustainable. The puzzle is that the bond rate has remained low and stable. Some suggest that the low yield can be explained by domestic residents' willingness to hold Japanese government bonds (JGBs) despite its...

Resource misallocation can lower aggregate total factor productivity (TFP). We use micro data on manufacturing establishments to quantify the potential extent of misallocation in China and India compared to the U.S. Compared to the U.S., we measure sizable gaps in marginal products of labor and...

This paper studies the employment and productivity implications of new labor regulations in China. These new restrictions are intended to protect workers' employment conditions by, among other things, increasing firing costs and increasing compensation. We estimate a model of costly labor...

We study the extent of macroeconomic convergence/divergence among euro area countries. Our analysis focuses on four variables (unemployment, inflation, relative prices and the current account), and seeks to uncover the role played by monetary union as a convergence factor by using non-euro...