Over the last few decades, countries have experienced quite different patterns of productivity growth. In this paper, we emphasize the role of country level demographics in explaining these differences. In particular, looking over the period 1960-2002, we show that cross-country data support the...

This paper is motivated by a set of cross-country observations on labor productivity growth among industrial countries over the period 1960-1997. In particular, we show that over this period, the speed of convergence among industrialized countries has decreased substantially while the negative...

This paper aims to examine to what extent a "ladder" e.ect may contribute to explain changes in unemployment in Spain. The "ladder" e.ect arises when highly-skilled workers who do not find a job that matches their skills, accept jobs that were previously occupied by less qualified staff. We...

The two leading explanations for the poor inflation performance during the 1970s are policy opportunism (Barro and Gordon 1983) and "inadvertently" bad monetary policy (Clarida, Gali, and Gertler 2000, Orphanides 2003). The main models of the latter category are that of Orphanides (loose...

We show that international trade in goods is the main determinant of international equity portfolios and it also offers a compelling - theoretically and empirically - resolution of the portfolio home bias puzzle. The model implies that investors can achieve full international risk...

We revisit the contribution of misperceived money to business cycles, and in particular to the inertial dynamics of inflation following a monetary policy shock. We establish three things. First, the difference between preliminary and revised money data captures monetary misperceptions well....