The recovery in private business investment globally remains extremely weak more than seven years after the financial crisis. This paper contributes to the ongoing policy debate on the factors behind this weakness by analyzing the role of growth prospects and uncertainty in explaining...

This paper reassesses the link between ICT prices, technology, and productivity. To understand how the ICT sector could come to the rescue of a whole economy, we extend a multi-sector model due to Oulton (2012) to include ICT services (e.g., cloud services) and use it to calibrate the...

This paper aims to shed light on the medium term effects of banking crises on productivity growth, bringing the 'creative destruction' hypothesis to the data. The analysis is done at both the macro and micro levels. At the macro level, I study the differences in mean productivity growth before...

Does the world experience a secular decline in capital productivity? Due to the long-run downward trend in interest rates, some economists do think so. However, this reasoning equates capital productivity with interest, which is a critical assumption. This paper presents a new proxy that can be...

We build a new dataset of listed and private nonfinancial zombie firms for a large set of Advanced Economies and Emerging Markets over the last two decades. We find that the share of these unproductive and unviable firms has been rising worldwide, especially since the GFC and the Covid-19...

We present evidence that an increase in investment as a share of GDP predicts a higher growth rate of output per worker, not only temporarily, but also in the steady state. These results are found using pooled annual data for a large panel of countries, using pooled data for non-overlapping...

What does the saving-investment (SI) relation really measure and how should the (SI) relation be measured? These are two of the most discussed issues triggered by the so called Feldstein-Horioka puzzle. Based on panel data we introduce a new variant of functional coefficient models that allow to...

This paper investigates the simultaneous causal relationship between investments in information and communication technology (ICT) and foreign direct investment (FDI), with reference to its implications on economic growth. For the empirical analysis we use data from 23 major countries with...

What does the saving-investment (SI) relation really measure and how should the SI relation be measured? These are two of the most discussed issues triggered by the so called Feldstein-Horioka puzzle. Based on panel data we introduce a new variant of functional coefficient models that allows to...