China has achieved impressive growth over the last three decades. However, there has been debate over the sources of the growth, and the role of the intensive versus extensive margin. Growth accounting exercises at the aggregate level (Rawski and Perkins, 2008; Bosworth and Collins, 2008) suggest an...

There has been an international trend towards shifting the provision of public services down to lower levels of government. That decentralization has increased the relative importance of local governments. This paper examines the relationship between spending by those local governments and...

An important strand of research in macro-finance investigates which factors impede enterprise investment, and what is their aggregate economic cost. In this paper, we make two contributions to this literature. The first contribution is methodological: we introduce a novel framework to calibrate...

This paper proposes a framework for comparing the predictions of representative household models with those of models of overlapping generations, in the context of a class of endogenous growth theories with investment adjustment costs. In the model used in this paper, savings and investment are...

The recovery of private investment in Italy has lagged its euro area peers over the past decade. This paper examines the role of elevated labor costs in hindering the recovery. Specifically, labor costs rose faster than labor productivity prior to the global financial crisis and have remained...

In the last few decades there has been little convergence of income levels in Latin America with those in the United States, in sharp contrast with both emerging Asia and emerging Europe. This paper argues that lack of convergence was not the result of low investment. Latin America is poorer...

This Productivity Commission staff working paper (by Paula Barnes) examines sectoral investment in intangible assets in Australia following on from a previous paper on an examination of intangibles assets in the market sector as a whole. It highlights some significant issues relating to the...

Using a new approach, we reexamine the empirical evidence on the long-term interactions between inflation and real variables. We find, using over 100 years of U.S. data, that in the long run the effect of inflation on investment and output is positive (a "Tobin type effect") and the investment...

The most widely accepted explanation for the inverse association between private investments and current accounts [Glick and Rogoff, 1995] rests on data for manufactures through 1990. Is this consensus robust to revisions to the national accounts and the expansion of information technologies...

An important strand of research in macro-finance investigates which factors impede enterprise investment, and what is their aggregate economic cost. In this paper, we make two contributions to this literature. The first contribution is methodological: we introduce a novel framework to calibrate...