This paper shows that finance has been a key ingredient of long-term economic growth in OECD and G20 countries over the past half-century, but that there can be too much finance. The evidence indicates that at current levels of household and business credit further expansion slows rather than...

Micro, small and medium-sized firms (MSMEs) are a key source of employment and economic growth in Indonesia. They contributed to the country’s economic resilience during the 2008-09 financial crisis. But many suffer from low productivity, curbing their role in boosting living standards. There...

The Irish economy has experienced a decline in productivity growth over the past decade. This has mostly reflected the poor performance of local firms, with the large productivity gap between foreign-owned and local enterprises having widened. Given the mobility of foreign-owned firms, achieving...

This paper investigates the existence of significant spillovers from the housing sector onto the wider economy for the seven major OECD countries using Uhlig's (2005) agnostic identification procedure. This method allows a housing demand shock to be identified in a six-variable VAR model by...

Portugal has notably increased its international openness over recent decades, with exports’ share of GDP rising by 20 percentage points since 1993. This analysis couples microdata with panel regression techniques to investigate the drivers of Portuguese export growth over the 1995-2016...