Delays and cost overruns in Public Sector investments can raise the capital-output ratio in the sector and elsewhere, bringing down the efficacy of investments. Yet there are no estimates of the delays and cost overruns, and of their opportunity cost. This study arrives at rough estimates of the...

New macro empirical evidence is provided to assess the relative importance of object and idea gaps in explaining the world income distribution dynamics over a benchmark period 1960-1985. Results are then extended through 1995. Formal statistical hypothesis tests allow us to discriminate between...

This Working Paper assesses the impact on investment of a reduction in corporate taxes and the impact on employment, labor formality, and growth of a reduction in non-wage labor costs in Colombia. First, and following Hall and Jorgensen (1967), we estimate an investment function, which depends...

Using a comprehensive international trade data set we investigate empirical regularities (known as Zipf’s Law or the rank-size rule) for the distribution of the interaction between countries as measured by revealed comparative advantage. Using the recently developed estimator by Gabaix and...

This paper analyzes the political economy of growth when agents and the government have finite horizons and equilibrium growth is inefficient. A quot;representativequot; government (that is, one whose preferences reflect those of its constituents) endowed merely with the ability to tax and...

Previous studies on regional convergence in the US have employed varied methodologies and yielded different conclusions. Some authors report evidence that convergence has grown stronger in recent decades, while others find recent years have seen an end to convergence. We test for convergence...

In the context of rising government debt levels in advanced economies and the ongoing euro zone debt crisis, there has been a revival of academic and policy debate on the impact of growing government debt on economic growth. This data-rich study offers an econometric investigation of the...

The rising government debt levels in the aftermath of global financial crisis and the ongoing euro zone debt crisis have necessitated the revival of the academic and policy debate on the impact of growing debt levels on growth. This study provides a data-rich analysis of the dynamics of...

The dynamics of sovereign debt and economic growth, once a subject of interest mostly to very few macroeconomists is suddenly of immense attention for many researchers in the backdrop of Euro zone sovereign debt crisis and Reinhart & Rogoff's related research. This study investigates the...