It is generally thought that there is a negative long-term relationship between inflation and growth and a positive long-term relationship between financial development and growth. The existing empirical literature suggests that the finance-growth relationship is more robust than the...

Although the finance-growth nexus has become firmly entrenched in the empirical literature, studies that question the strength of the empirical results have appeared and seem to have become more frequent as well. In this paper we reexamine the core crosscountry panel results that established the...

The robustness of the cross-sectional relationship between the size of a country's financial sector and its rate of economic growth is by now well established. In this article, we examine whether the strength of this relationship varies with the inflation rate. Using five-year averages of...

We model Moore's Law as efficiency of computer producers that rises as a by-product of their experience. We find that (1) Because computer prices fall much faster than the prices of electricity-driven and diesel-driven capital ever did, growth in the coming decades should be very fast, and that...

We study private equity in a dynamic general equilibrium model and ask two questions: (i) Why does the investment of venture funds respond more strongly to the business cycle than that of buyout funds? (ii) Why are venture funds returns higher than those of buyout? On (i), venture brings in new...

A general purpose technology or GPT is a term coined to describe a new method of producing and inventing that is important enough to have a protracted aggregate impact. Electricity and information technology (IT) probably are the two most important GPTs so far. We analyze how the U.S. economy...

The rapid growth of equity markets in emerging economies over the past decade has prompted economists to raise important questions about their macroeconomic impact. Although the relative brevity of this expansion has made it challenging to perform such an evaluation, there remains a strong...

This paper examines the nature of links between the intensity of financial intermediation and economic performance that operated in the U.S., the U.K., Canada, Norway and Sweden over the 1870-1929 period. After describing the co- evolution of the financial and real sectors in these countries,...

During the U.S. National Banking Period (1863-1913), a network of correspondent banking relationships left the nation vulnerable to systemic risks, bank failures, and financial panics. We use comprehensive data on primary correspondent relationships for all national, state, savings, and private...

Recent cross-country investigations of the role of institutional fundamentals such as the protection of property rights in promoting financial development have extended a literature that has for decades maintained that financial factors can affect real outcomes. In this paper we pursue this new...