I argue that distinguishing between life expectancy at birth and life expectancy beyond the crucial early childhood years affects the relationship between life expectancy and schooling in a meaningful way. In particular, I show that while the change in life expectancy at birth between 1960 and...

This paper examines the effect of Wal-Mart's entry into Mexico on Mexican manufacturers of consumer goods. Guided by firm interviews that suggested substantial heterogeneity across firms in how they responded to Wal-Mart's entry, we develop a dynamic industry model in which firms decide whether...

We draw attention to the role of economic geography in explaining important cross-sectional facts which are difficult to account for in existing models of industrialization. By construction, closed-economy models that stress the role of local demand in generating sufficient expenditure on...

This paper reviews the recent theoretical literature on heterogeneous firms and trade, which emphasizes firm selection into international markets and reallocations of resources across firms. We discuss the empirical challenges that motivated this research and its relationship to traditional...

This paper offers new tests of the `convergence hypothesis'. It first analyses the pattern of growth of measured inputs (human and physical capital conventionally measured by an inventory method) and shows that these tests sustain the hypothesis. On the other hand, when the pattern of growth of...

A model of a small open economy with open capital and labour markets is presented. Labour demand is based on capital mobility and increasing returns in production. Migration decisions are based on the relative attractiveness of regions in terms of the stock of infrastructure, including its tax...

What is the impact of movement towards free trade on output? Can this impact permanently affect output levels, and more importantly, will it have an impact on steady-state growth rates? This paper provides empirical evidence showing how countries have exhibited substantial increases in their...

Using a human-capital-based growth model, we show the essential role of labour mobility and cross-country tax harmonization in equalizing income levels of countries that start off from different initial income positions. Knowledge spillovers cum labour mobility are the driving forces behind the...

Despite current economic problems and conflicts - or perhaps as their cause - the concordance of policies among the major industrial countries in the first half of the 1980s in dealing with finance, trade and development is at a peak. This has been the result not so much of cooperation or...

The paper develops two models in which parents support their adult child’s human capital investment through financial transfers and/or coresidence. In one, parents are altruistic, and in the other they make loans to children for purely selfish reasons. Econometric estimates using the first...