This book concentrates on the role of human capital as a growth engine in the process of economic development and its effect on a better explanation of the long-run relationship between growth, inflation and other monetary phenomena. The first part of the book provides a general theory of how...

The empirical evidence suggests that there is a significant, negative relationship between inflation and economic growth. Conventional monetary growth models, however, predict a significantly smaller growth effect. This paper proposes a monetary growth model with an explicit credit service...

There are two strands in the empirical literature on economic growth in transition economies. One focuses on the impact of reforms, while the other emphasizes sustainability issues and the growth prospects these economies face. The most common strategy, in the latter, has been to use...

One of the most enduring debates in economics is whether financial development causes economic growth or whether it is a consequence of increased economic activity. Little research into this question, however, has used a true causality framework. This paper fills this lacuna by using...

Economies have markedly different firm size distributions. At the same time, firms of different size grow differently after identical financial- and product-market liberalization reforms. Thus, identical reforms can produce different growth outcomes across countries. This result is reached after...

Recent changes in the microfinance landscape are characterized by increasing patterns of its integration with national financial systems and entry of commercial banks. Microfinance is no longer perceived as an isolated marginal sector of informal intermediation but rather constitutes particular...

The paper analyzes the influence of credit-, labor-, and product market deregulation policies on economic growth in more than 70 economies over a period of 30 years. It addresses both the issues of reform measurement and its endogeneity. Specifically, by combining a difference-in-difference...

This paper presents an endogenous growth model where, in line with the recent em- pirical evidence, the telecommunications industry (telecom) is an engine of growth. In such a framework, this paper analyzes the channels through which telecom con- tributes to economic growth and focuses on market...

In this paper, we define specific (general) human capital in terms of the occupations whose use is spread in a limited (wide) set of industries. We analyze the growth impact of an economy's composition of specific and general human capital, in a model where education and R&D are costly and...