There are large differences in welfare — measured as gross domestic product (GDP) per capita — across nations. Over time, there are numerous country experiences in relative income of catch-up, collapse, and catch-up followed by a decline. What explains why some countries are rich and others...

We study the business cycle properties of exchange rates and other macro-economic variables in a panel of developed and developing countries. We find substantial variation in the degree of co-movement of exchange rates with other macroeconomic variables across countries in our sample. Moreover,...

In this article, we document three remarkable facts about the distribution of output per worker (labor productivity) across countries between 1960 and 1996. First, there is a large disparity in labor productivity across countries in the world. Second, disparity has increased substantially since...

We assess the effects of a major land policy change on farm size and agricultural productivity using a quantitative model and micro-level data. We study the 1988 land reform in the Philippines that imposed a ceiling on land holdings, redistributed above-ceiling lands to landless and smallholder...

In this paper we show that the study of the farm size-productivity relationship hinges on the choice of productivity measure. Our main insight is that using yields, a partial measure of productivity, may not be informative for the size-productivity relationship because, in addition to total...

We assess the effects of a major land policy change on farm size and agricultural productivity using a quantitative model and micro-level data. We study the 1988 land reform in the Philippines that imposed a ceiling on land holdings, redistributed above-ceiling lands to landless and smallholder...