This paper assesses the relationship between institutions, output, and productivity when official output is corrected for the size of the shadow economy. Our results confirm the usual positive impact of institutional quality on official output and total factor productivity, and its negative...

Empirical studies assume that the macro Mincer return on schooling is constant across countries. Using a large sample of countries this paper shows that countries with a better quality of education have on average relatively higher macro Mincer coefficients. As rich countries have on average...

Empirical studies assume that the macro Mincer return on schooling is con- stant across countries. Using a large sample of countries this paper shows that countries with a better quality of education have on average relatively higher macro Mincer coeficients. As rich countries have on average...

Are labor markets in higher-income countries more meritocratic, in the sense that worker-job matching is based on skills rather than idiosyncratic attributes unrelated to productivity? If so, why? And what are the aggregate consequences? Using internationally comparable data on worker skills and...

We re-estimate the World Technology Frontier (WTF) non-parametrically, using the Data Envelopment Analysis method, with a dataset covering both OECD country-level and US state-level data on GDP per worker and the stocks of physical capital, unskilled labor, and skilled labor. The WTF 2000 is...

This paper assesses the relationship between institutions, output, and productivity, when official output is corrected for the size of the shadow economy. Our results confirm the usual positive impact of institutional quality on official output and total factor productivity, and its negative...

This article presents a group of exercises of level and growth decomposition of output per worker using cross-country data from 1970 to 2000. It is shown that in the early seventies factors of production (capital and education) were the main source of output dispersion across economies and that...

This paper assesses the relationship between institutions, output, and productivity, when official output is corrected for the size of the shadow economy. Our results confirm the usual positive impact of institutional quality on official output and total factor productivity, and its negative...

This paper studies cross country differences in productivity from an open economy perspective by using a Helpman-Krugman-Heckscher-Ohlin model. This allows to combine tools from development accounting and the trade literature. When simultaneously fitting data on income, factor prices and the...

In this paper, we construct and estimate a unified model combining three of the main sources of cross-country income disparities: differences in factor endowments, barriers to technology adoption and the inappropriateness of frontier technologies to local conditions. The key components of our...