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Working Paper
Deindustrialization and Industry Polarization
We add to recent evidence on deindustrialization and document a new pattern: increasing industry polarization over time. We assess whether these new features of structural change can be explained by a dynamic open economy model with two primary driving forces, sector-biased productivity growth and sectoral trade integration. We calibrate the model to the same countries used to document our patterns. We find that sector-biased productivity growth is important for deindustrialization by reducing the relative price of manufacturing to services, and sectoral trade integration is important for ...
Journal Article
An investigation of co-movements among the growth rates of the G-7 countries
Early in 2000, after a decade of economic expansion, growth began to slow simultaneously in the large, advanced economies known as the Group of Seven (G-7)--Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the United Kingdom, and the United States. The general slide in GDP growth fueled speculation that a period was emerging in which broad movements in the economies of the industrialized countries would be more closely linked. Proponents of this view argued that greater trade in goods and financial markets was leading to a greater synchronization of national economies. A rise in the co-movement of GDP ...
Working Paper
Exchange Rates and Endogenous Productivity
Real exchange rates (RERs) display sizable uctuations not only over the business cycle, but also at lower frequencies, resulting in large and persistent swings over decades|facts that many business cycle models struggle to match. We propose an international macroeconomics model with endogenous productivity to rationalize these facts. In the model, endogenous growth amplifies stationary uctuations generating persistent productivity differences between countries that trigger low-frequency cycles in the RER. The estimated model effortlessly replicates the empirical spectrum, autocorrelation, and ...
Working Paper
The Global Diffusion of Ideas
We provide a tractable theory of innovation and technology diffusion to explore the role of international trade in the process of development. We model innovation and diffusion as a process involving the combination of new ideas with insights from other industries or countries. We provide conditions under which each country's equilibrium frontier of knowledge converges to a Frechet distribution, and derive a system of differential equations describing the evolution of the scale parameters of these distributions, i.e., countries' stocks of knowledge. In particular, the growth of a country's ...
Speech
U.S. monetary policy and its global implications
Remarks at the Central Bank of the United Arab Emirates, Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates.
Working Paper
Argentina’s “Missing Capital” Puzzle and Limited Commitment Constraints
Capital accumulation in Argentina was slow in the 1990s, despite high total factor productivity (TFP) growth and low international interest rates. A possible explanation for the ?missing capital? is that foreign investors were reluctant to take advantage of the high returns to investment seemingly offered by that small open economy under such favorable conditions, on the grounds that previous historical developments had led them to perceive Argentina as a country prone to external debt ?opportunistic defaults.? The paper examines this conjecture from the perspective of an optimal contract ...
Working Paper
Markets, Externalities, and the Dynamic Gains of Openness
Inflows of foreign knowledge are the key for developing countries to catch up with the world technology frontier. In this paper, I construct a simple tractable model to analyze (a) the incentives of foreign firms to bring their know-how to a developing country and (b) the incentives of domestic firms to invest in their own know-how, given the exposure to foreign ideas and competition. The model embeds two diffusion mechanisms typically considered separately in the literature: externalities and markets. The dynamic gains of openness can be substantial under either mechanism, but their relative ...
Report
The Global Financial Resource Curse
Since the late 1990s, the United States has received large capital flows from developing countries and experienced a productivity growth slowdown. Motivated by these facts, we provide a model connecting international financial integration and global productivity growth. The key feature is that the tradable sector is the engine of growth of the economy. Capital flows from developing countries to the United States boost demand for U.S. non-tradable goods. This induces a reallocation of U.S. economic activity from the tradable sector to the non-tradable one. In turn, lower profits in the ...
Working Paper
World Productivity: 1996 - 2014
We account for the sources of world productivity growth, using data for more than 36 industries and 40 major economies from 1996 to 2014, explicitly taking into account changes in the misallocation of resources in labor, capital, and product markets. Productivity growth in advanced economies slowed but emerging markets grew more quickly which kept global productivity growth relatively constant until around 2010. After that, productivity growth in all major regions slowed. Much of the volatility in world productivity growth reflects shifts in the misallocation of labor across countries and ...
Working Paper
Do Sovereign Wealth Funds Dampen the Negative Effects of Commodity Price Volatility?
This paper studies the impact of commodity terms of trade (CToT) volatility on economic growth (and its sources) in a sample of 69 commodity-dependent countries, and assesses the role of Sovereign Wealth Funds (SWFs) and quality of institutions in their long-term growth performance. Using annual data over the period 1981-2014, we employ the Cross-Sectionally augmented Autoregressive Distributive Lag (CS-ARDL) methodology for estimation to account for cross-country heterogeneity, cross-sectional dependence, and feedback effects. We find that while CToT volatility exerts a negative impact on ...