In an influential 2001, Journal of Economic Growth paper, Masters and McMillan find that one factor differentiating wealthy countries from poor includes annual winter frosts, which helps farmers to increase agricultural productivity and helps people to control disease, particularly malaria. This...

We present a new composite leading indicator of economic activity in mainland China, estimated using a dynamic factor model. Our leading indicator is constructed from three series: exports, a real estate climate index, and the Shanghai Stock Exchange index. These series are found to share a...

This paper analyses the long run effects of the 2000 Income Tax Act in Estonia in a dynamic equilibrium model. It studiesthe impact of the shift from an imputation system to a system in which companies pay taxes only with respect to distributed profits.Balanced growth paths, transitional...

The article uses a structural vector autoregressive (SVAR) model under some well agreed-on long-run neutrality assumption to identify relative supply, relative demand, and relative nominal shocks in Euroland vs. the UK. The empirical results indicate that most of the variation in relative output...

Corsetti, Pesetti & Roubini (1999) present a model of the Asian crisis focussed on moral hazard as a source of overinvestment. In this comment, we show that the model as stated by them does not necessarily imply moral hazard. We provide and discuss an additional assumption, which is necessary...

Economists frequently confine themselves to the qualitative analysis of continuous optimization problems or they restrict their quantitative analysis to inaccurate methods like linearization around the steady state. The fact that the solution is characterized by an inherently unstable adjustment...

The paper bases itself on recent theoretical writings in growth economics that emphasize the effects of both own R&D efforts and of interregional technology spillovers on regions´ productivity. We propose robust estimation techniques to evaluate the R&D spillovers across West German functional...

The paper analyses the interaction between capital structure and employment decisions of firms. For this purpose, a theoretical model is developed in which a firm determines employment along an optimal path taking into account financial considerations. The empirical analysis using West German...

We establish stylised facts for Germany's business cycle at the firm level. Based on longitudinal firm-level data from the Bundesbank's balance sheet statistic covering, on average, 55,000 firms per year from 1971 to 1998, we analyse the reallocation across individual producers and its...