This paper studies the growth effects of externalities associated with intergenerational health transmission, health persistence, and women's occupational constraints- with particular emphasis on the role of access to infrastructure. The first part provides a review of the evidence on these...

This paper studies the existence of middle-income growth traps in a two-period overlapping generations model of economic growth with two types of labor and endogenous occupational choices. It also distinguishes between "basic" and "advanced" infrastructure, with the latter promoting design...

This paper studies the long-run impact of policies aimed at fostering gender equality on economic growth in Brazil. The first part provides a brief review of gender issues in the country. The second part presents a gender-based, three-period OLG model that accounts for women's time allocation...

This paper studies the role of public policy in promoting industrial transformation from an imitationbased, low-skill economy to an innovation-based, high-skill economy, where technological progress now occurs through the domestic invention of ideas. Industrial transformation is measured by...

Links between social capital, human capital, and product imitation are studied in an overlapping generations model of endogenous growth where the key benefit of social capital is to promote imitation. There is also a two-way interaction between imitation and human capital. Building social...

This paper studies interactions between access to finance, product innovation, and labor supply in a two-period overlapping generations model with an endogenous skill distribution and credit market frictions. In the model lack of access to finance (induced by high monitoring costs) has an...

The paper develops and tests a model of a developing economy that incorporates trade and capital restrictions, illegal transactions, a parallel foreign exchange market, currency substitution features, and forward-looking rational expectations. Temporary expansionary demand policies are...

This paper develops a model of devaluation crises for an economy where foreign exchange restrictions lead to the emergence of a parallel market. The devaluation rule relates the size of the parity change to the spread between the official and parallel exchange rates. The mechanism that triggers...

The paper examines the short- and long-term effects of price liberalization in a reforming socialist economy. The analysis is based on an optimizing framework that highlights hoarding behavior and the existence of parallel goods markets. The behavior of official and parallel market prices, stock...

This paper examines the short-run links between money growth, exchange rate depreciation, nominal wage growth, the output gap, and inflation in Chile, Korea, Mexico, and Turkey, using a generalized vector autoregression analysis. Nominal historical wage shocks are shown to have an important...