We examine the view that high-quality macroeconomic policy is a necessary, but not sufficient, condition for economic growth. We first construct a new index of the quality of macroeconomic policy. We then directly compare growth rate distributions across countries with good and bad policies; use...

The time series evidence on the relationship between unemployment and the real prices of capital and energy is re-examined for US data. In contrast to previous studies, results indicate that the real interest rate matters little, if at all, for equilibrium unemployment. Using a Markov Switching...

This paper studies the e¤ect of political liberalisation on financial development in two steps. First, the paper examines whether political liberalisation in terms of institutional improvement promotes financial development, using a panel dataset of 90 developed and developing countries over...

This work examines the presence of unobserved components in the time series of Total Factor Productivity, which is an idea central to modern Macroeconomics. The main approaches in both the study of economic growth and the study of business cycles rely on certain properties of the different...

This paper investigates the hypothesis that child labour is compelled by poverty or that the child's income contribution is needed by the household in order to meet subsistence expenditures. We show that a testable implication of this hypothesis is that the wage elasticity of child labour supply...

This paper argues that dual economy models deserve a central place in the analysis of growth in developing countries. The paper shows how these models can be used to analyze the output losses associated with factor mis-allocation, aggregate growth in the presence of factor market distortions,...

This paper considers the relationship between the extraction rates and remaining reserves of a non-renewable resource. Linear extraction rules are derived wherein the slope term is the same regardless of the cost parameters and market structure whilst differences are captured by the intercept....

In this paper we develop and estimate a new-Keynesian model of inflation and use it to investigate the hypothesis that prices in the UK are re-set more frequently during periods of high inflation. In the model, firms are assumed to condition their expectations on an optimally-selected but...

This paper investigates the way in which parental human capital investment in young co-resident children varies with their own consumption. It is motivated by rejection of parental altruism in recent research, the unexpectedly small effects of parental income on child outcomes found in a number...

We examine the impact that financial development had on earnings inequality in Brazil in the 1980's and 90's. The empirical evidence, based on panel time series and time series data, shows that more broad access to financial and credit markets had a significant and robust effect in reducing...