Usually housing is viewed in the context of consumption resulting from other economic drivers such as income and employment. Here, we study how two key local economic measures, the gross metropolitan product (GMP) and unemployment rate, respond to shocks in home value appreciation, home sales, and new construction, respectively. Our analysis relies upon a large panel of 158 metropolitan statist...

In this paper we report the results from a detailed investigation of the shifts of the world production frontier function over the period 1980-2010. Analogous to a radar we implement a novel measurement approach for these shifts using nonparametrically computed productivity measures to scan the frontier shifts across the entire input-output space. The shifts of the frontier function measured in...

We examine the effect of financial integration on capital stocks and income per capita, explicitly taking into account the division of output between tradable and non-tradable goods. Capital per worker in a financially integrated country is shown to depend on the size and relative capital-intensity of the tradable sector. Using a panel of 67 countries over the period 1976-1999, we show a weakly...

Although FDI is widely believed to have a positive effect on economic growth, the exact mechanism of how FDI impacts upon the development process of the newly industrialising economies is far from being well understood. This paper presents and tests two propositions on the role of FDI in economic growth from a newly industrialising economy’s perspective. First, FDI is a mover of production effi...

The views expressed in this Working Paper are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily represent those of the IMF or IMF policy. Working Papers describe research in progress by the author(s) and are published to elicit comments and to further debate. Despite strong economic growth, a "U"-curve unemployment phenomenon in Mauritius can be observed. Unemployment plunged from 21 percent to les...

Estimating Cross-Industry Cross-Country Models Using Benchmark Industry Characteristics* International industry data permits testing whether the industry-specific impact of cross-country differences in institutions or policies is consistent with economic theory. Empirical implementation requires specifying the industry characteristics that determine impact strength. Most of the literature has b...

We study the impact of the technological change on asset prices in a dynamic model economy that features a stochastic technology frontier and costly technology adoption. Firms adopt the latest technology embodied in new capital to reach the stochastic technology frontier, but this decision entails an adoption cost. The model predicts that firms operating with old capital are more risky and henc...

This paper provides new evidence about the link between firm level total factor productivity (TFP) and stock returns. We estimate firm level TFP and show that it is strongly related to several firm characteristics such as size, the book to market ratio, investment, and hiring rate. Low productivity firms earn a significant premium over high productivity firms in the following year, and this pre...

The order Zoraptera (angel insects) is one of the least known insect groups, containing only 32 extant species. The phylogenetic position of Zoraptera is poorly understood, but it is generally thought to be closely related to either Paraneoptera (hemipteroid orders: booklice, lice, thrips, and bugs), Dictyoptera (blattoid orders: cockroaches, termites, and mantis), or Embioptera (web spinners)....

We document that the expectations of households, firms, and professional forecasters in standard surveys simultaneously extrapolate from recent events underreact to new information. Existing models expectation formation, whether behavioral or rational, cannot account for these observations. develop a rational theory extrapolation based on limited attention, which is consistent with this evidenc...