Maize (Zea mays L.) is the most important cereal crop in the hills of Nepal, where the grain is used for human consumption and the stover for animal fodder. Maize farms are small, and population pressure necessitates the intensification of existing farming systems. Maize research directed at...

This thesis is a contribution towards the macroeconomic and monetary analysis of developing countries. A fully-fledged macroeconometric model is theoretically specified, econometrically estimated and dynamically simulated for policy analysis. The model contains demand side, supply side, balance...

We study resource misallocation by explicitly modelling R&D input and knowledge spillovers. The effects of R&D and spillovers on firm-level productivity are extensively studied in applied work, but not in the context of resource misallocation. We establish that, in the presence of spillovers,...

A growing body of post-global financial crisis (2007-2008) literature documents several undesirable effects of enlarged financial sectors. One of these effects is the 'growth cost' of excessive finance, which reports that the finance-growth relationship is non-monotonic, and that a credit...

A consensus in the growth literature is that scale effects of R&D are non-existent across mature industrialized economies. However, the scrutiny across emerging economies is lacklustre at best. The empirical studies of scale effects also leave the issues of unbalanced regression (non-standard...

The existing weight of evidence suggests that financial structure (the classification of a financial system as bank-based versus market-based) is irrelevant for economic growth. This contradicts the common belief that the institutional structure of a financial system matters. We re-examine this...

There has been a concomitant rise in R&D and the rate of economic growth in emerging countries. Analyzing a panel of 31 emerging countries, we find convincing evidence of scale effects which make government policies potent for long-run growth. This contrasts sharply with the well known findings...

This paper uses primary data collected from the Central Bank reports to examine the influence of financial sector policies on the average productivity of capital in five South East Asian economies. The data include measures of `repressionist' policies encompassing interest rate controls,...