Renewed interest in economic growth has encouraged studies of how different sectors have contributed to convergence trends. Comparing productivity levels across countries is notoriously tricky, but one attractive approach has been to deflate sector value added by the PPP exchange rate for GDP....

In the literature technical change is mostly assumed to be exogenous and specified as afunction of time. However, some exogenous external factors other than time can also affecttechnical change. In this paper we model technical change via time trend (purely externalnon-economic) as well as other...

We propose a simple but effective estimation procedure to extract the level and the volatilitydynamics of a latent macroeconomic factor from a panel of observable indicators. Our approachis based on a multivariate conditionally heteroskedastic exact factor model that cantake into account the...

This note investigates the effects of the education level, product market rigidities andemployment protection legislation on growth. It exploits macro-panel data for OECDcountries...

BEA’s national economic statistics provide a comprehensive view of U.S. production, consumption, investment, exports and imports, and income and saving. These statistics are best known by summary measures such as gross domestic product (GDP), corporate profits, personal income and spending,...

BEA’s national economic statistics provide a comprehensive view of U.S. production, consumption, investment, exports and imports, and income and saving. These statistics are best known by summary measures such as gross domestic product (GDP), corporate profits, personal income and spending,...

This paper is an exercise in dating the Euro area business cycle on a monthly basis. Using a quite flexible interpolation routine, we construct several monthly series of Euro area real GDP, and then apply the Bry-Boschan (1971) procedure. To account for the asymmetry in growth regimes and...

The composite indicator "Quality of work" for comparing European countries is constructed from data of the Third European Survey on Working Conditions. The main findings are as follows: (a) European countries differ with respect to working conditions statistically more signi¯cantly than with...