Small start-up firms are the engine of job creation in early transition and yet little is known about the characteristics of this new sector. We seek to identify patterns of job growth in this sector in terms of niches left from central planning and ask about differences in job creation across...

We investigate the role of sectoral differences in labor productivity and the process of structural transformation (the secular reallocation of labor across sectors) in accounting for the time path of aggregate productivity across countries. Using a simple model of the structural transformation...

We provide evidence that the robust association between cognitive skills and economic growth reflects a causal effect of cognitive skills and supports the economic benefits of effective school policy. We develop a new common metric that allows tracking student achievement across countries, over...

A unified growth theory is developed that accounts for the roughly constant living standards displayed by world economies prior to 1800 as well as the growing living standards exhibited by modern industrial economies. Our theory also explains the industrial revolution, which is the transition...

We show that equity market liberalizations, on average, lead to a one percent increase in annual real economic growth over a five-year period. The liberalization effect is not spuriously accounted for by macro-economic reforms and does not reflect a business cycle effect. Although financial...

In 1997-98, five east Asian countries -- Indonesia, Malaysia, South Korea, the Philippines, and Thailand -- experienced sharp currency and banking crises. The contraction of real GDP was severe in relation to the previous history and in comparison with five east Asian countries that were less...

Some natural resources -- oil and minerals in particular -- exert a negative and nonlinear impact on growth via their deleterious impact on institutional quality. We show this result to be very robust. The Nigerian experience provides telling confirmation of this aspect of natural resources....

This essay analyzes the long-run economic effects of HIV/AIDS in Kenya, with emphasis on fertility, education and child labor. Human capital, which is built up through formal education and parental child-rearing, is the only input in production. Two aspects are central to the analysis: First, a...

The paper uses unique aggregate industry-level dataset at subnational level from India to measure the effects of foreign investments on the productivity of domestic firms. Using pooled regression analysis with fixed effects for the period 2002 – 2005, we find that: (a) foreign investments have...

Abstract Both Mexico and China have started export orientation in some industries, through assembly operations, based on imported inputs a couple of decades ago. The literature on industrialization, has discussed the questions of import substitutions and outward-orientation mainly as alternative...