US labor force participation has been weak in recent decades, especially during the recovery of the financial crisis of 2007–09. This paper examines several programs that governments in other advanced industrial countries have established to help jobless workers continue to seek employment,...

Despite more robust growth than many advanced economies in Europe and Asia, labor force participation in the United States between 1995 and 2017 was weak. In other countries, job loss has manifested itself as increased unemployment as opposed to labor force exit. For men, the decline in labor...

The empirical literature on the relationship between democracy and growth has yielded conflicting results. Cross-country studies have failed to identify a significant impact of democracy on growth, while within-country studies have found a strong positive effect of the transition to democracy on...

Using firm level data, the authors examine how global industrial concentration has changed over the last decade in relation to the rise of China. Between 2006 and 2014, global concentration has declined in most industries and is falling on average across all industries, while firms at the top of...

From the mid-1990s until the financial crisis, global trade grew twice as fast as global income, far faster than in previous or subsequent periods. During this period of rapid trade growth, global current account imbalances also expanded rapidly. If excess savings in some countries financed more...

Much of the public discourse and media analysis of the surprise outcome of the 2016 US presidential election has emphasized the role of manufacturing workers. This paper examines the importance of manufacturing jobs and job loss as determinants of voting patterns using county-level voting data...

This paper examines the effects of border-adjusted consumption taxes (mainly value added taxes or VATs) in a sample of 34 advanced economies from 1970 through 2015. We find that the real exchange rate tends to rise by the full amount of any consumption tax increase, with little effect on the...

This working paper presents a new dataset on the sources of billionaire wealth and uses it to describe changes in extreme wealth in the United States, Europe, and other advanced countries. The data classify wealth as either self-made or inherited and identify the company and industry from which...

This paper uses firm-level data on manufacturing trade from 40 developing countries to explore how the five largest exporters in a country contribute to export growth and diversification. The origins of these firms are also studied. The data show that the top five exporters account for on...

This paper investigates three cases — Malaysia, Costa Rica, and Morocco — in which host authorities were successful in using foreign direct investment to change the export profile of the domestic economy. Each case highlights the importance of first-mover firms, and clusters of follower...