What is the efficiency cost of rent-seeking activities in Argentina? This paper quantitatively shows that rent-seeking activities in the form of bribes have aggregate effects through two channels. First, they generate misallocation of resources across firms because they prevent resources from...

Over the past decades, East Asia and Pacific's productivity has been gradually catching up with the frontier (the United States), with China leading the pack. Productivity growth has been driven by sustained within-sector productivity growth. Reallocation of labor to sectors with higher...

This paper examines within-sector resource misallocation in three Southeast Asian countries - Indonesia, Malaysia, and Vietnam. The methodology accounts for measurement error in revenues and costs. The firm-level evidence suggests that measurement error is substantial, resulting in an...