We use data on announced and actual exchange rate arrangements to ask which countries follow de facto regimes different from their de iure ones, that is, do not do what they say. Our results suggest that countries with poor institutional quality have difficulty in maintaining pegging and abandon it often. In contrast, many countries with relatively good institutions display fear of floating, th...

Transition economies have an initial condition of high human capital relative to GDP per capita. But they will not necessarily realize their latent high growth potential. In the model, at a good equilibrium a large number of children of well-educated parents take advantage of their family backgrounds and invest substantially in their own human capital. At a bad equilibrium, past educational ach...

Using the most comprehensive developing country dataset ever compiled on air and water pollution and environmental regulations, the paper assesses India’s environmental regulations with a difference-in-differences design. The air pollution regulations are associated with substantial improvements in air quality. The most successful air regulation resulted in a modest, but statistically insignifi...

This paper examines the interactions between Foreign Direct Investment (FDI), inequality, and growth, both from an empirical and a theoretical point of view. Using a panel of 119 developing countries, we observe that FDI promotes both inequality and growth, and tends to reduce the share of agriculture to GDP in the recipient country. We then set up a growth model of a dual economy in which the ...

Four stylized facts of economic growth in DCs are set up initially. Despite its obvious simplicity the linear growth model with subsistence consumption is able to reproduce two of them: a rise in the saving rate along with per capita income as well as b-divergence. The rate of convergence shows extraordinarily low values at early stages of economic development. Hence, the big diversity in growt...

This paper considers the Greenspan/Summers/IMF (GSI) argument that the Asian way of doing business was the deep cause of the Asian crisis. The IMF reform programme for the crisis-affected Asian countries suggested they should abandon the Asian business model and adopt the US corporate model. The main findings are: a) contrary to GSI doctrine, poor corporate governance and lack of competition ar...

Does access to credit explain the gap in schooling attainment between children from richer and poorer families? I present new evidence on this important question using two college tuition loans in Chile. Both programs offer loans to students who score above a threshold on the national college admission test, enabling a regression discontinuity design. I find that loan access implies an increase...

We test for long-term damages from precipitation shocks in rural Brazil by observing wages of households that have permanently migrated from rural to urban areas. We find that large short-term precipitation shocks damage migrants’ long-term wages. We offer an analytical explanation for this outcome: credit-constrained households may be willing to accept lower wages in urban areas following the ...

This paper shows that deindustrialization is explained primarily by developments that are internal to the advanced economies. These include the combined effects on manufacturing employment of a relatively faster growth of productivity in manufacturing, the associated relative price changes, and shifts in the structure of demand between manufactures and services. North-south trade explains less ...

We investigate the effects that regional start-up activity has on employment in new and in incumbent businesses. The analysis is performed for West German regions over the 1987-2002 period. It shows that the effects of new businesses on employment in the incumbents are significantly positive and that this indirect effect on incumbent employment leads to more jobs than what is created by the new...