This paper considers how appropriately designed financial institutions can allow economic development to become self-financing, and improve the management of the currency and the economy. The business concept of self-financing, not found in leading economic text books, is described. Related...

Substantial data revisions have shown that the U.S. recession in 2008 to 2009 was far more pronounced than originally estimated, and that the recovery has been slower than previously assumed. Leading indicators signal that growth will stay weak in the second half of 2011. With key interest rates...

While Japan’s economy is showing the first signs of a hesitant recovery, the upturn already gained a foothold in the U.S. economy in the second half of 2011 on the back of robust domestic demand. Conditions in the labor market relaxed perceptibly, while the real estate market is still waiting...

The most striking difference in corporate-governance arrangements between rich and poor countries is that the latter rely much more heavily on the dynastic family firm, where ownership and control are passed on from one generation to the other. We argue that if the heir to the family firm has no...

Hansen and Lonstrup [Journal of Population Economics, 2012] construct a three-period, life-cycle model to study the famed Ben-Porath mechanism and attempt to reconcile it with the empirical findings in Hazan [Econometrica, 2009]: increased life expectancy has a positive effect on schooling but a...

This paper analyzes the impact of business regulation on private investment in developing countries with a particular emphasis on sub-Saharan Africa. Using the principal component analysis methodology, we construct the following composite indexes of the regulatory framework: entry regulation,...

We study the relationship between geography and growth. To do so, we first develop a dynamic spatial growth theory with realistic geography. We characterize the model and its balanced growth path and propose a methodology to analyze equilibria with different levels of migration frictions. We...

The present paper provides an overview of literature on the shift to services. It follows the three dimensions of structural change - final demand, the inter-industry division of labor and inter-industry productivity differences. It first looks at the ‘classics’, however (Fisher (1935),...

We formulate a version of the growth model in which production is carried out by heterogeneous plants and calibrate it to US data. In the context of this model we argue that differences in the allocation of resources across heterogeneous plants may be an important factor in accounting for...