We exploit historical data on planned highways, railroads, and exploration routes as sources of exogenous variation, in order to estimate the effect of interstate highways on regional innovation: a 10% increase in a region?s stock of highways causes a 1.7% increase in regional patenting over a five-year period. In terms of the mechanism, we report evidence that roads facilitate local knowledge ...

Environmental pollution and human health problems are becoming serious issues in China. This research focuses on regional differences in productive inefficiencies and attempts to clarify the determinants of inefficiency, accounting economic, environmental and health-related factors. Our dataset includes information of 29 areas in China from 2003 to 2009. We find that after accounting for enviro...

In this paper the time series properties of the outcomes of two different specifications of a nonparametric productivity analysis are compared using data for threeand four-digit U.S. manufacturing industries over the period 1958-96. The first model is standard and does not account for variations of capacity utilization of the production factors whereas the second model does. Correcting for util...

This paper provides a time-series analysis of recent annual estimates of real GDP and industrial output covering 1270 to 1913. We show that growth can be regarded as a segmented trend stationary process. On this basis, we find that trend growth of real GDP per person was zero prior to the 1660s but then experienced two significant accelerations, preand post-industrial revolution. We also find t...

This paper examines the costs and bene ̄ts of government control of enterprises in transition, using a large survey of Chinese state enterprises. We ̄nd that tighter government control causes more unpro ̄table production and more surplus employment and thus tends to distort more severely enterprises' economic decisions. However, tighter government control also tends to reduce agency costs by forc...

I adopt the distribution dynamics framework to study labor productivity convergence, in the period 1980-1995, among 28 developed and developing countries, in different manufacturing sub-sectors, identified, as according their technological content into Resource Based, Low Technology, Medium Technology and High Technology. I find that, exception made for High Technology and Manufacturing as a wh...

This paper considers the problem of how to construct price indexes on a panel data set. First a suitable panel data set is constructed by merging Eurostat’s Harmonized Index of Consumer Prices (HICP) with a cross-section of OECD data. Second, seven different methods for constructing price indexes on a panel are proposed. These are then applied to the merged HICP/OECD data set. Temporal and spat...

We study the importance of input-output (IO) linkages and sectoral productivity (TFP) in determining cross-country income differences. find that while highly connected sectors are more productive than typical sector poor countries, opposite is true rich ones. To assess quantitative role TFP differences differences, we decompose variation using a multisector general equilibrium model. IO substan...

What are the prospects for long-run economic growth? One prominent line of thinking is trend toward stagnation. Stagnationism has a long history in economics, beginning prominently with Malthus and occasionally surfacing different guises. Prominent themes here following: Will growth slow perhaps even reverse under weight resource depletion? overpopulation diminishing returns lower living standa...

This paper analyzes the impact of investment in information technology (IT) on the recent resurgence of world economic growth. We describe the growth of the world economy, seven regions, and 14 major economies during the period 1989–2004. We allocate the growth of world output between input growth and productivity and find, surprisingly, that input growth greatly predominates! Moreover, differe...