Reforms that promote economic growth have also an impact on the distribution of capital and income. This paper considers the effect of a rise in the elasticity of substitution between capital and labor. It uses the normalized CES function introduced by Klump and de La Grandville. A reform that...

In most resource-driven developing economies, a mineral-based formal sector and an informal resource sector (such as charcoal production) constitute the main economic activities, from which local dwellers derive their livelihoods. The paper examines the coexistence of formal and informal...

The aim of this paper is to bring together two distinct ensembles of evidence concerning, at macro level, international distributions of incomes and their dynamics, and, at micro level, the size distributions of firms and the properties of their growth rates. We also include an intermediate...

This paper presents a two-countries dynamic model of Schumpeterian growth with two innovative R&D sectors in each country: a vertical R&D sector that improves the quality of existing differentiated products and a horizontal R&D sector that creates new differentiated products. The two countries...

The paper studies the effect of liberalization of imports and foreign direct investment on Russian firms. Using the firm-level data from 1993-2000, the paper finds that competition with imports and with FDI exerts positive effect on domestic firms. Prior to the 1998 crisis, this effect is weaker...

In this paper we explore whether the constitutional text has any practical meaning for welfare policy. To examine the empirical importance of the constitution, we first constructed for 68 countries an index of constitutional commitment to social security in five areas: Old Age, disability and...

Do policies that alter the allocation of human capital across individuals affect the innovation capacity of an economy? To answer this question I extend Romer’s growth model to allow for individual heterogeneity. I find that the value of an invention rises with equality. If skills and talents...

Presidential democracies were 4.9 times more likely to default on external debts between 1976 and 2000 than parliamentary democracies. This paper argues that the explanation to the pattern of serial defaults among a number of sovereign borrowers lies in their constitutions (on serial defaults...

In open-economy macroeconomics there is a monetary model in the Keynesian tradition that is deemed serviceable for analyzing the short run and there is a nonmonetary neoclassical theory thought capable of handling the long run. But do the Keynesian and neoclassical models meet the challenges...

This paper employs the behavioral equilibrium exchange rate (BEER) model to estimate the equilibrium real exchange rate of Renminbi (RMB) and the exchange rate misalignment in China, which covers the period from 1994q1 to 2006q2. Using the most precise and recent data, the main findings of the...