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...

Over the last two decades, Mexico has experienced macroeconomic stability, an open trade regime, and substantial progress in education. Yet average workers' earnings have stagnated, and earnings of those with higher schooling have fallen, compressing the earnings distribution and lowering the...

This paper investigates the sources of capital misallocation across a group of 11 developing and developed countries. The main findings are (i) technological frictions, namely, adjustment costs and uncertainty, account for only a modest share of observed misallocation, leaving ample scope for...

Management of common-pool resources in the absence of individual pricing can lead to suboptimal allocation. In the context of irrigation schemes, this can create water scarcity even when there is sufficient water to meet the total requirements. High-frequency data from three irrigation schemes...

This paper attempts to study the impact of Brazilian Development Bank credit on resource misallocation in Brazil, using manufacturing firm-level data from 2003-14. The paper first estimates measures of resource misallocation based on Hsieh and Klenow (2009), documenting high variation in firms'...

The reallocation of resources from low- to high-productivity firms can generate large aggregate productivity gains. The paper uses data from the Malaysian manufacturing census to measure the country's hypothetical productivity gains when moving toward the level of within-sector allocative...

Corporations often have strong incentives to exert influence on the tax code and obtain additional tax benefits through lobbying. For the U.S. financial crisis of 2007-09, this paper shows that lobbying activity intensified, driven by large firms in sectors that depend more on external finance....

This paper proposes a quantitative model of firm dynamics with endogenous innovation to study growth acceleration episodes triggered by reforms. The authors find that reforms removing barriers to firm entry lead to persistent growth in TFP and declining average firm size, as in the experience of...

This paper uses a quasi-experimental study of a major bridge construction in Bangladesh to understand the effects of a large reduction in trade costs on the pattern of structural change and agricultural productivity. The paper develops a spatial general equilibrium model with a core and two...

This paper argues that relying on major policy distortions to create a domestic automotive industry through import substitution generates significant costs for the economy, in terms of foregone output, lower consumption, and reduced overall welfare. To bring this issue into sharp relief, the...