An extensive literature uses anthropometric measures, typically heights, to draw inferences about living standards in the past. This literature's influence reaches beyond economic history; the results of historical heights research appear as crucial components in development economics and related fields. The historical heights literature often relies on micro-samples drawn from sub-populations ...

This paper investigates both aggregate and distributional impacts of the trade integration of China, India, and Central and Eastern Europe in a quantitative multi-country multi-sector model, comparing outcomes with and without factor market frictions. Under perfect withincountry factor mobility, the gains to the rest of the world from trade integration of emerging giants are 0.37%, ranging from...

Developing countries typically exhibit small firm size, high dispersion of marginal productivity of factors across firms, 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 b...

Combining consensus forecasts of growth of population and real incomes during 2014–35 with household income surveys for more than a hundred countries accounting for the bulk of the world economy, we project the income distribution in 2035 across all individuals in the world. We find that the Gini coefficient of global inequality declined from 69 in 2003 to 65 in 2013, and we project that it wil...

The aim of this paper is to identify the nature of R&D spillovers from an intersectoral, international as well as combined international-intersectoral perspective. We use panel data for sub-sectors of the manufacturing industry among 13 OECD countries in the period 1988 to 2006. We estimate Griliches-type knowledge production functions at the aggregate level along with two-digit industry level,...

This Working Paper should not be reported as representing the views of the IMF. 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. Ukraine has the potential to be a very wealthy country. It ha...

Has the progress of output convergence changed within the United States? This article examines the output convergence among U.S. states for the last five decades by making several improvements over the extant literature. By applying a battery of convergence tests designed to capture nonlinear transitional dynamics to real output per worker data (i.e., nominal values deflated by state-level pric...

This paper sheds light on two problems in the Penn World Table (PWT) GDP estimates. First,we show that these estimates vary substantially across different versions of the PWT despitebeing derived from very similar underlying data and using almost identical methodologies; thatthis variability is systematic; and that it is intrinsic to the methodology deployed by the PWT toest...

The link between foreign aid and economic growth remains a controversial issue in the literature, and a large share of the disagreement could be explained by differences in the data employed. Using GDP data from three different versions of the Penn World Table and the World Development Indicators, I investigate the robustness of Juselius, Møller and Tarp (2014)'s (JMT) conclusions about long-ru...