The subject of labor unions in Latin America provokes a variety of diverse and strongly held views. While some see unions as a way to protect workers' rights and ensure an equitable distribution of income, others see unions as a drain of productivity or an intrusion of politics into the...

This paper uses two sources of information and different methodologies to analyze the causal effect of product and process innovation on productivity in the Chilean manufacturing industry during the past decade. In general, the evidence suggests there is not a contemporaneous effect of product...

This paper studies the impact of trade liberalization on labor and capital gross flows and productivity in the Uruguayan manufacturing sector. Uruguay opened its economy in the presence of -at least initially- strong unions and structurally different industry concentration levels. Higher...

Despite the widespread popularity of the Solow growth model, much of the recent empirical work based on the classic framework misrepresents a crucial feature of the model. Namely, the growth rate of technological progress, assumed to be exogenous in the Solow model, is often identified as being...

Many people point to information and communications technology (ICT) as the key for understanding the acceleration in productivity in the United States since the mid-1990s. Stories of ICT as a 'general purpose technology' suggest that measured TFP should rise in ICT-using sectors (reflecting...

In this paper, we show that ignoring corporate intangible investments gives a distorted picture of the post-1990 U.S. economy. In particular, ignoring intangible investments in the late 1990s leads one to conclude that productivity growth was modest, corporate profits were low, and corporate...

In recent financial crises and in recent theoretical studies of them, abrupt declines in capital inflows, or sudden stops, have been linked with large drops in output. Do sudden stops cause output drops? No, according to a standard equilibrium model in which sudden stops are generated by an...