This paper is the first chapter in the Oxford Companion to the Economics of China (Oxford University Press, forthcoming). Rather than trying to summarize other contributors' views, we provide our own perspectives on the Economics of China--the past experience and the future prospects. Our...

The paper introduces a framework for studying the hierarchy of growth factors, from deep to more immediate. The specific setting we examine is 18th and 19th century Germany, when institutional changes introduced by reforms and transportation improvements converged to create city growth. We...

In a number of influential recent papers, Taylor (1979a, b; 1980a, b) has analyzed the behaviour of an economy characterized by staggered over-lapping wage contracts and rational expectations. His model has the "Keynesian" feature that the second moment of the distribution function of real output...

Macroeconomists have for some time been aware that the New Keynesian Phillips curve, though highly popular in the literature, cannot explain the persistence observed in actual inflation. We argue that two of the more prominent alternative formulations, the Fuhrer and Moore (1995) relative...

This chapter (to appear in the forthcoming Handbook of International Economics, Vol. 5) develops a framework with which to interpret and survey answers to the question: how does increased openness affect aggregate welfare in a typical developing country? We decompose answers into four...

This paper presents a model where human capital differences - rather than technology differences - can explain several central phenomena in the world economy. The results follow from the educational choices of workers, who decide not just how long to train, but also how broadly. A "knowledge...

We estimate the respective contributions of institutions, geography, and trade in determining income levels around the world, using recently developed instruments for institutions and trade. Our results indicate that the quality of institutions trumps' everything else. Once institutions are...

We show that much of Africa's recent growth and poverty reduction can be traced to a substantive decline in the share of the labor force engaged in agriculture. This decline has been accompanied by a systematic increase in the productivity of the labor force, as it has moved from low...

We build a model of the global financial cycle with one key ingredient: the demand for safe dollar assets. The model matches patterns of dollar borrowing and currency mismatch, the U.S. external balance sheet, low U.S. interest rates and exorbitant privilege, spillovers of the U.S. monetary...

This paper examines Argentina's currency crises from 1970 to 2001, with particular attention to the role of domestic and external factors. Using VAR estimations, we find that deteriorating domestic fundamentals matter. For example, at the core of the late 1980s crises was excessively loose...