The fiscal theory of the price level (FTPL) has been active for 30 years, and the interest in this theory grew with the recent global surges in inflation and government spending. This study applies the FTPL to 37 OECD countries for 2020-2022. The theory's centerpiece is the government's...

Shifts in the extent of competition, which affect markup ratios, are possible sources of aggregate business fluctuations. Markups are countercyclical, and booms are times at which the economy operates more efficiently. We begin with a real model in which markup ratios correspond to the prices of...

What is the optimal number of currencies in the world? Common currencies affect trading costs and, thereby, the amounts of trade, output, and consumption. From the perspective of monetary policy, the adoption of another country's currency trades off the benefits of commitment to price stability...

This paper presents a data set that improves the measurement of educational attainment for a broad group of countries. We extend our previous estimates of educational attainment for the population over age 15 and over age 25 up to 1995 and provide projections for 2000. We discuss the estimation...

We investigate the determinants of educational quality in a panel data set that includes" output and input measures for a broad number of countries. The results show that family inputs" and school resources are closely related to school outcomes, as measured by internationally" comparable test...

We construct a model that combines elements of endogenous growth with the convergence implications of the neoclassical growth model. In the long run, the world growth rate is driven by discoveries in the technologically leading economies. Followers converge toward the leaders because copying is...

Technological progress takes the form of improvements in quality of an array of intermediate inputs to production. In an equilibrium that is standard in the literature, all research is carried out by outsiders, and success means that the outsider replaces the incumbent as the industry leader....

Many theories of economic growth stress the role of human capital in the form of education, but empirical studies have been hampered by inadequate data. We describe a data set on educational attainment that we have constructed for 129 countries over five-year periods from 1960-1985. We use...

For 116 countries from 1965 to 1985, the lowest quintile had an average growth rate of real per capita GDP of -1.3%, whereas the highest quintile had an average of 4.8%. We isolate five influences that discriminate reasonably well between the slow and fast-growers: a conditional convergence...

The empirical evidence reveals conditional convergence in the sense that economies grow faster per capita if they start further below their steady-state positions. For a homogeneous group of economies - like the U.S. states, regions of western European countries, and the GECD countries - the...