Inequality and Growth: The Dual Role of Human Capital in Development

To examine how human capital accumulation influences both economic growth and income inequality, we carefully endogenize the demand and supply of skills. We explicitly introduce the costs and externalities in education, and examine how both relate to learning-by-doing and R&D intensity. In addition, we endogenize the determinants of the skill-bias of labor demand: the complementarity between technology and skilled and unskilled labor. Our results identify parameters that are central to the evolution of inequality during the development process. We characterise development thresholds when countries switch endogenously from pure learning to directed R&D, and we show that technical change can generate multiple steady states that are consistent with the cross-country data on inequality and skill-premia.Human capital, wage inequality, biased technical change, threshold externalities

Institutions and Economic Performance: Endogeneity and Parameter Heterogeneity

The hallmark of the recent development and growth literature is a quest to identify institutions that explain a significant portion of the observed differences in living standards across countries. Empirical work in the area focuses almost exclusively on either the global sample or on developing nations. Certainly it is important to know which institutions are lacking in these developing countries, but the analysis provides little evidence for us to know to what extend a common set of institutions actually matters in advanced and developing countries. In this paper we examine parameter heterogeneity in prominent approaches to institutions and economic performance. We find that a new set of instruments is necessary to control for endogeneity, but that a common set of economically important institutions does indeed exist among advanced and developing nations. The impact of these institutions does vary substantially across samples; it is about three times as high in developing countries as compared to OECD countries

Institutions and Growth: Time Series Evidence from Natural Experiments

Documenting the long term impact of institutions on economic performance has generated tremendous interest in the development literature. Contemporary or intermediate term effects of institutions over time are difficult to establish, however, since institutions seldom change significantly in the short run. In addition, accepted instruments that control for endogeneity of institutions in cross sections are inappropriate for time series analysis. In this paper we utilize an eleven year panel of 26 countries with sufficient institutional variation to identify large and significant short and intermediate effects of institutions. To control for endogeneity, we utilize the hierarchy of institutions hypothesis and find that it holds strong explanatory power. A 10 percent change in institutional quality towards OECD standards is shown to raise annual growth by 3.5 percent. In discriminating between short run and intermediate term effects, we can also document that early reformers reap the greatest benefits, but that it is never too late to begin institutional reform. *We thank Sascha Becker, Christa Heinz, Stephan Klasen, Chris Papageorgiou, Charles Nelson, Richard Startz, Farid Toubal, Steve Turnovsky, and especially John Temple for helpful comments. Any remaining errors are our own. Theo Eicher thanks the German Science Foundation for financial support. …i

Institutional Determinants of Economic Performance in OECD Countries – An Institutions Climate Index

Wirtschaftswachstum, Wirtschaftspolitik, Entwicklung, OECD-Staaten, Economic growth, Economic policy, Economic development, OECD countries

One Money, One Market: A Revised Benchmark

The introduction of the euro generated substantial interest in measuring the impact of currency unions (CUs) on trade flows. Rose’s (2000) initial estimates suggested a tripling of trade and created a literature in search of “more reasonable” CU effects. A recent meta-analysis of this literature shows that subsequent papers quantify CU trade impacts at 30–90 percent. However, most recent studies use shorter time series and fewer countries than Rose in his original work. We revisit Rose’s original benchmark, extend the dataset, and address Baldwin’s (2006) critiques of gravity implementation in large panels by simultaneously accounting for multilateral resistance and unobserved bilateral heterogeneity. This produces a robust average CU trade effect of 45 percent. Yet, the trade impacts of individual CUs vary substantially and are generally lower than those of preferential trade agreements (PTAs). Our revised benchmark can be used as a yardstick for future studies to delineate how estimates differ due to new data or differences in econometric specifications.

Politics and Trade Policy: An Empirical Investigation

In this paper we examine the empirical relevance of three prominent endogenous protection models. Is protection for sale, or do altruistic policy makers worry about political support? We find strong evidence that protection is indeed "for sale." The important new result is, however, that not only the existence of lobbies matters, but also the relative size of the sectoral pro and anti protection contributions. All variables of both the Influence Driven (Grossman and Helpman, 1994) and the Tariff Function (Findlay and Wellisz, 1982) models are significant at the one percent level. Novel is our application of a single, unified theoretical framework to take strict interpretations of the three theoretical models to the data. We thus extend the previous tests of the Influence Driven approach by comparing its performance to well specified alternatives. Using J tests to compare the power of the models directly, we find significant misspecification in the Political Support Function approach. We cannot reject the null hypothesis of correct specification of the Influence Driven model and find evidence of some misspecification in the Tariff Function model.Endogenous protection, lobbying, political economy of tariffs

Sources of the German Productivity Demise – Tracing the Effects of Industry-Level ICT Investment

While the US experienced two successive labor productivity surges in 1995 and 2000, Germany’s productivity declined dramatically during the same period. We examine the sources of Germany’s productivity demise using the ifo industry growth accounting database that provides detailed industry-level investment information. While much attention has focused on the reduction in German labor hours, our data show that Information, Communication and Technology (ICT) investment in Germany was deeply lacking in the mid 1990’s as compared to the US. The transition to the new economy mitigated the German productivity slowdown, but did not reverse it. After 2000, we find that a recovery in Non-ICT investment was offset by a widespread collapse in German total factor productivity. Over half of German industries (accounting for almost 50 percent of German output) experienced negative TFP growth. This second major difference between the US and German industry performance explains Germany’s secular departure from the technological frontier.growth accounting, industry productivity analysis, information and communication technology

Institutions and Economic Performance: Endogeneity and Parameter Heterogeneity

The hallmark of the recent development and growth literature is the quest to identify institutions that explain significant portions of the observed differences in living standards. There are two drawbacks to the prominent approaches that focus either on the global sample, or on developing nations. First, it is unclear whether the identified institutions also hold explanatory power in advanced countries. Second, it is unclear whether the identified institutions matter to the same degree across all countries, or whether perhaps an altogether different set of institutions matters in advanced countries. To address these issues, we examine parameter heterogeneity in prominent approaches to institutions and economic performance. We find that parameter heterogeneity is so strong that it requires a new set of instruments to control for endogeneity. At the same time, however, we confirm that a common set of economically important institutions does exist among advanced and developing nations. The impact of these institutions is shown to vary substantially across subsamples; they are about three times important in developing countries as in OECD countries.

Inequality and Growth: The Dual Role of Human Capital in Development

To examine how human capital accumulation influences both economic growth and income inequality, we carefully endogenize the demand and supply of skills. We explicitly introduce the costs and externalities in education, and examine how both relate to learning-by-doing and R&D intensity. In addition, we endogenize the determinants of the skill-bias of labor demand: the complementarity between technology and skilled and unskilled labor. Our results identify parameters that are central to the evolution of inequality during the development process. We characterise development thresholds when countries switch endogenously from pure learning to directed R&D, and we show that technical change can generate multiple steady states that are consistent with the cross-country data on inequality and skill-premia

Intellectual Property Rights as Development Determinants

Intellectual property rights (IPRs) have been identified as key drivers of economic performance in R&D based growth models, but their impact on development has not been fully explored in development accounting exercises. We introduce IPRs to the development accounting literature, using Two-Stage Least Squares Bayesian Model Averaging (2SBMA) to address endogeneity and model uncertainty at the instrument and income stages. We show that IPRs exert similar effects as “Rule of Law,” which has long been heralded as a core development determinant in cross country regressions. Our results thus provide robust evidence that both dimensions of property rights, physical and intellectual, are crucial prerequisites to economic development. Most importantly, we document that IPRs those that are simply written into law, but are unenforced, exert no effect on development. Instead, it is the level of enforced IPRs that causes development.