Recent research on international productivity comparisons with historical data has encountered large discrepancies between benchmark comparisons and time series extrapolations from other benchmarks. Broadberry and Burhop (2005) have recently argued that for Hoffmann's (1965) widely accepted time...

We evaluate explanations for why Germany grew so quickly in the 1950s. The recent literature has emphasized convergence, structural change and institutional shake-up while minimizing the importance of the postwar shock. We show that this shock and its consequences were more important than...

This paper studies the dynamic effects of an uncertainty shock on firm expectations. We conduct a survey that confronts managers from a representative firm sample with a model-consistent uncertainty shock scenario. An exogenous increase in uncertainty significantly reduces managers' expected...

This paper studies the global synchronicity of technology and its impact on the economy. We employ dynamic factor analysis to decompose patent data in different digital technologies for various countries into global and country-specific factors. Our findings confirm the existence of global and...