Economic Reforms and Productivity-Enhancing Reallocation in the Post-Soviet Transition How do economic reforms affect resource reallocation processes and their contributions to productivity growth? This paper studies the consequences of enterprise privatization and liberalization of product markets, labor markets, and imports in the former Soviet Republics of Russia and Ukraine. Analyzing inter...

We investigate country heterogeneity in cross-country growth regressions. In contrast to the previous literature that focuses on low-income countries, this study also highlights growth determinants in high-income (OECD) countries. We introduce Iterative Bayesian Model Averaging (IBMA) to address not only potential parameter heterogeneity, but also the model uncertainty inherent in growth regres...

This paper examines the relationship between foreign ownership and productivity, paying particular attention to two issues neglected in the existing literature – the role of multinationals in service sectors and the importance of R&D activity conducted by foreign multinationals. We review existing theoretical and empirical work, which largely focuses on manufacturing, before presenting new evid...

Human Capital, Economic Growth, and Regional Inequality in China We study the dispersion in rates of provincial economicand TFP growth in China. Our results show that regional growth patterns can be understood as a function of several interrelated factors, which include investment in physical capital, human capital, and infrastructure capital; the infusion of new technology and its regional spr...

This paper studies the relationship between export activities and firm-level productivity. Unique matching of German and Austrian micro data from 1994 to 2003 suggests that exporters are more productive by around 40 percent compared with non-exporters. Moreover, beside other analysis techniques, instrumental variable estimations suggest that exporting causes a rise in firm-level productivity. T...

This paper contributes to the conflicting international evidence on the impact of information and communication technology (ICT) on labour productivity (LP) growth. We examine the link between ICT intensity and New Zealand s LP growth in 29 industries over the period 1988–2003, and over relevant sub-periods. After deriving an ICT intensity index to classify industries into more ICT intensive an...

This paper marks the first attempt at examining the growth performance across Indian states for the 2000s, a period also marked by the global financial crisis. We report four key findings. First, consistent with the fact that the 2000s was the best ever decade for Indian macroeconomic performance, growth increased across almost all major states in 2001–09 compared to 1993–2001. Second, neverthe...

Pressure on public finances has increased scrutiny of public support for innovation. We examine two particular issues. First, there have been many recent calls for the (relatively new) UK R&D subsidy to be extended to other “research” activities, such as software. Second, argument still rages about the efficacy of direct public spending on R&D via spending on academic research councils, univers...

This paper utilizes a new flow measure of the true output of bank services to analyze the impact of mergers on the cost and productivity of Bank Holding Companies (BHCs) over the period 1987–1999. It shows that there are conceptual problems in the output measures used in previous studies, which may be the reason for their paradoxical findings: Bank mergers are estimated to lead to significant i...

Developing countries typically exhibit small firm size, high dispersion of firm-level productivity, and low trade-to-output ratios. They also tend to export particularly less to more distant and smaller markets. To rationalize these facts, this paper develops a flexible, multi-country general equilibrium model of production and trade in which heterogeneous producers face both domestic size-depe...