This paper studies the effects of financial liberalization and banking crises on growth. It shows that financial liberalization spurs on average economic growth. Banking crises are harmful for growth, but to a lesser extent in countries with open financial systems and good institutions. The...

Recent sovereign defaults are accompanied by interest rate spikes and deep recessions. This paper develops a small open economy model to study default risk and its interaction with output and foreign debt. Default probabilities and interest rates depend on incentives for repayment. Default is...

This paper presents estimates of the long-term impact of various sources of knowledge (R&D performed by the business sector, the public sector and foreign firms) on multifactor productivity growth of 16 countries from 1980 to 1998. The main results show that the three sources of knowledge are...

Severe economic fluctuations which had recently hit the entire world economy after relatively prosperous decades despite numerous institutional efforts to control them have recalled an interest to the theory of economic cycles. Historical data on main economic indexes and academic evidence show...

World economic crisis increases every day, and Romania begins increasingly to feel the economic recession, which economists from major global fail to find the antidote. The question to ask is: Will Romania be able in 2009 to find solutions and resources to remove the country from one of the...

This article approaches the problem of competitiveness and aims to outline the place of our country from the point of view of competitiveness as opposed to other countries; this analysis is carried out at a global level. One can notice that our country has a pretty low position in the world...

We present a model in which individuals' preferences are defined over their consumption, transfers to offspring, and social status associated with income. We show that a separating equilibrium exists where individuals' expenditure on conspicuous consumption is a signal for their unobserved...

Combining the classical “push-pull factors” and the “Lucas paradox” theoretical approaches, and taking into account the relationship between components of capital flows -through Three Stage Least Square (3SLS) estimations-, this paper shows that physical infrastructure and financial...

The sign of worker remittances in growth regressions is heavily disputed in the literature. Comparing two growth regressions with different signs for the remittance variable we show that collinearity with the lagged dependent variable might indicate that collinearity should be investigated...

The empirical literature on the relationship between inequality and growth offers a contradictory assessment: Estimators based on time-series variation indicate a positive link while estimators (also) exploiting the cross-sectional variation suggest a negative relationship. The present paper (i)...