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Working Paper
Institutions Do Not Rule: Reassessing the Driving Forces of Economic Development
The pursuit to uncover the driving forces behind cross-country income gaps has divided economists into two major camps: One emphasizes institutions, while the other stresses non-institutional forces such as geography. Each school of thought has its own theoretical foundation and empirical support, but they share an implicit hypothesis?the forces driving economic development remain the same regardless of a country?s stage of development. Such hypothesis implies a theory that the process of development in human history is a continuous improvement in income levels, driven by the same forces, and ...
Report
Who Collaborates with the Soviets? Financial Distress and Technology Transfer During the Great Depression
We provide evidence that financial distress induces firms to sell their technology to foreign competitors. To do so, we construct a novel, spatial panel dataset by individually researching and locating U.S. firms who signed Technology Transfer Agreements (TTAs) with the Soviet Union during the 1920s and 1930s in various U.S. counties. By relating the number of TTAs signed in each county to the number of bank failures, we establish a significant, positive relationship between financial distress and the number of firms signing TTAs with the Soviet Union. Our findings suggest that banking panics ...
Working Paper
Macroeconomic Effects of China's Financial Policies
The Chinese economy has undergone three major phases: the 1978?97 period marked as the SOE-led economy, the 1998?2015 phase as the investment-driven economy, and the new normal economy since 2016. All three economies have been shaped by the government financial policies, defined as a set of credit policy, monetary policy, and regulatory policy. We analyze the macroeconomic effects of these financial policies throughout the three phases and provide the stylized facts to substantiate our analysis. The stylized facts differ qualitatively across different phases or economies. We argue that the ...
Early U.S. Trade Deficits and Industrialization
Trade deficits during the country’s first phase of industrialization did not inhibit U.S. development and may have facilitated industrialization.
Shifts in U.S. Trade Balance and Industrialization
As the U.S. has industrialized, changes in comparative advantage relative to those of other nations have led to periods of persistent trade surpluses and deficits.
Journal Article
How to Jump-Start Industrialization in Sub-Saharan Africa
Most sub-Saharan nations are poor and a long way from full-scale industrialization. However, certain policies could help spur their economic development.