This paper discusses the analytical foundations of international comparisons for assessing a country's potential for improvement along various dimensions of social and economic development. The paper presents the Stochastic Frontier approach and applies it to estimate feasible frontiers or...

This paper examines the problem of variable selection in linear regression models. Bayesian model averaging has become an important tool in empirical settings with large numbers of potential regressors and relatively limited numbers of observations. The paper analyzes the effect of a variety of...

The authors present a measure of jointness to explore dependence among regressors in the context of Bayesian model selection. The jointness measure they propose equals the posterior odds ratio between those models that include a set of variables and the models that only include proper subsets....

This paper examines the effect of finance on long-term economic growth using Bayesian model averaging to address model uncertainty in cross-country growth regressions. The literature largely focuses on financial indicators that assess the financial depth of banks and stock markets. These...

Joseph Schumpeter argued in 1911 that the services provided by financial intermediaries - mobilizing savings, evaluating projects, managing risk, monitoring managers, and facilitating transactions -stimulate technological innovation and economic development. The authors present evidence that...

Although emerging market and developing economies (EMDEs) weathered the global recession a decade ago relatively well, they now appear less well placed to cope with the substantial downside risks facing the global economy. In many EMDEs, the room for monetary and fiscal policies to respond to...

This paper revisits the relationship between energy intensity and economic growth, using a flexible piecewise linear regression model. Based on a panel data set of 137 economies during 1990-2014, the analysis identifies a threshold effect of income growth on energy intensity change: although...

This paper surveys the literature to document the main stylized facts, risks, and policy challenges related to the expansion of global nonfinancial corporate debt after the 2008–09 global financial crisis. Nonfinancial corporate debt steadily increased after the crisis, especially in emerging...