Investment growth in emerging market and developing economies has slowed sharply since 2010. This paper presents a comprehensive analysis of the causes and implications of this slowdown and presents a menu of policy responses to improve investment growth. It reports four main results. First, the...

This paper proposes an extension of the Blinder-Oaxaca decomposition from two to a continuum of comparison groups. The proposed decomposition is then estimated for the case of racial wage differences in urban Peru, exploiting a novel data set that allows the capturing of mestizaje (racial mixtures).

The paper analyzes the effect of mother tongue on labor market outcomes of Swiss residents. This type of analysis can shed light on an important policy question. Is the Swiss labor market well integrated, or can one find instead segmentation along language borders? Improving on previous research...

This paper empirically tests for two competing explanations of the increasing sex ratio at birth (SRB) in India: hepatitis B and human intervention. Estimating a male- preferring stopping rule with data from three rounds of the National Family Health Survey in India (1992, 1998 and 2005), I find...

This article analyzes the relationship between abortion and female education. It provides new empirical evidence from sub-Saharan Africa to show that more liberal abortion policies are associated with a higher female secondary school enrollment. It is assumed in the model that easier access to...

This study uses Swedish data to analyze why the SES-health gradient increases with ageing. Since different measures of SES and health capture different aspects, we use this information to explore the age increase in health inequality and to discriminate between three types of explanations,...

The United States in the 19th century was marked by initially quite high fertility levels but also by the onset of a relatively early and steep decline in fertility. Most of what we know about these patterns in the US comes from aggregate (typically county or state level) data. We provide new,...

In this paper, we test for the existence of socioeconomic heterogeneity in the effect of health shocks on labor market outcomes using register data on the total population of Swedish workers. We estimate fixed effect models and use unexpected hospitalizations as a measure of health shocks. Our...

This study challenges the traditional way of examining the "inflation-output growth nexus". Research at the aggregate level yields mostly ambiguous results, we perform a dis-aggregated analysis of output growth and inflation. For each sector - industry, services and agriculture - we consider...

We study the extent of global inflation synchronization using a dynamic factor model in a large set of countries over a half century. Our methodology allows us to account for differences across groups of countries (advanced economies and emerging market and developing economies) and to analyze...