We find that trade and domestic market size are robust determinants of economic growth over the 1960-1996 period when trade openness is measured as the US dollar value of imports and exports relative to GDP in PPP US$ (“real openness”). When trade openness is measured as the US dollar value of imports and exports relative to GDP in exchange rate US$ (“nominal openness”) however, trade and the s...

This paper introduces new data on climatic conditions to empirical tests of growth theories. We find that, since 1960, temperate countries have converged towards high levels of income while tropical nations have converged towards various income levels associated with economic scale and the extent of the market. These results hold for a wide range of tests. A plausible explanation is that temper...

We analyze recent contributions to growth theory based on the model of expanding variety of Romer (1990). In the first part, we present different versions of the benchmark linear model with imperfect competition. These include the “labequipment” model, “labor-for-intermediates” and “directed technical change”. We review applications of the expanding variety framework to the analysis of internat...

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 ...

Article history: This paper tests for beta-convergence and sigma-convergence in the corporate governancemodels, using a samAccepted 12 July 2012 ple of corporate governance ratings for 198 European corporations listed on the FTSE Eurofirst 300 index. A piecewise linear regression is deployed to select amodel and the Poisson pseudo-maximum likelihood estimator JEL classification: is also applied...

Why do so many African governments consistently impose high tax rates and make little investment in productive public goods when alternative policies could yield greater tax revenues and higher national income? We posit and test an intertemporal political economy model in which the government sets tax and R&D levels while investors respond with production. Equilibrium policy and growth rates de...

To examine the effects of unilateral trade liberalization on growth and welfare of the liberalizing and partner countries through intraindustry reallocations, we formulate an asymmetric two-country Melitz model of trade and endogenous growth based on capital accumulation. We obtain two main results. First, each country’s mass of exported varieties, revenue share of exported varieties, and growt...

Examining the correlation between trade and income cannot identify the direction of causation between the two. Countries’ geographic characteristics, however, have important effects on trade, and are plausibly uncorrelated with other determinants of income. This paper therefore constructs measures of the geographic component of countries’ trade, and uses those measures to obtain instrumental va...

Organic aerosols (OA) can be separated with factor analysis of aerosol mass spectrometer (AMS) data into hydrocarbon-like OA (HOA) and oxygenated OA (OOA). We develop a new method to parameterize H:C of OOA in terms of f43 (ratio of m/z 43, mostly C2H3O, to total signal in the component mass spectrum). Such parameterization allows for the transformation of large database of ambient OOA componen...