Is there a single recipe for fast growth? Much of the recent cross-section empirical growth literature implicitly assumes there is. Yet both development and growth theory as well as casual empiricism suggest pervasive non-linearities in the growth process. Low inflation may grease the wheels of...

Post-1945 Europe had many of the traits observed today in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union: price controls, shortages, black markets and a monetary overhang. The policy response in most countries was monetary reform - - the deliberate immobilization of liquid assets and in many instances an...

The U.K. skill premium fell from the 1950s to the late 1970s and then rose very sharply. This paper examines the contributions to these relative wage movements of international trade and technical change. We first measure trade as changes in product prices and technical change as TFP growth....

The impact of an economic shock depends both on its severity and the resilience of the economic response. Resilience can include the ability to relocate factors, for example, even when new technologies or skills are not yet at the ready. This resilience per se buffers production and has an...

This paper surveys the debate on arms-length and relationship-based financial systems with a special focus on the Eastern Europe and Central Asia region. The paper argues that while the initial dominance of relationship-based systems in the region is consistent with the implications of the...