Explore the vast range of titles available.

This paper studies the relationship between public debt expansion and economic growth and investigates whether the debt-growth relation varies with the level of indebtedness. We contribute theoretically by developing tests for threshold effects in the context of dynamic heterogeneous panel data models with cross-sectionally dependent errors. In the empirical application, using data on a sample of forty countries over the 1965–2010 period, we find no evidence for a universally applicable threshold effect in the relationship between public debt and economic growth. Regardless of the threshold, however, we find significant negative effects of public debt buildup on output growth.

We describe the theory and practice of real GDP comparisons across countries and over time. Version 8 of the Penn World Table expands on previous versions in three respects. First, in addition to comparisons of living standards using components of real GDP on the expenditure side, we provide a measure of productive capacity, called real GDP on the output side. Second, growth rates are benchmarked to multiple years of cross-country price data so they are less sensitive to new benchmark data. Third, data on capital stocks and productivity are (re)introduced. Applications including the Balassa-Samuelson effect and development accounting are discussed.

We complement the literature on distributive politics by taking a systematic look at regional favoritism in a large and diverse sample of countries and by employing a broad measure that captures the aggregate distributive effect of many different policies. In particular, we use satellite data on nighttime light intensity and information about the birthplaces of the countries’ political leaders. In our panel of 38,427 subnational regions from 126 countries with yearly observations from 1992 to 2009, we find that subnational regions have more intense nighttime light when being the birth region of the current political leader. We argue that this finding provides evidence for regional favoritism. We explore the dynamics and the geographical extent of regional favoritism and show that regional favoritism is most prevalent in countries with weak political institutions and poorly educated citizens. Furthermore, foreign aid inflows and oil rents tend to fuel regional favoritism in weakly institutionalized countries, but not elsewhere.

International relationships are increasingly critical to business performance. Yet despite a recent surge in international research on relationship marketing (RM), it is unclear whether or how RM should be adapted across cultures. The authors adopt Hofstede's dimensions of culture to conduct a comprehensive, multivariate, metaregression analysis of 47,864 relationships across 170 studies, 36 countries, and six continents. To guide theory, they propose four tenets that parsimoniously capture the essence of culture's effects on RM. Study 1 affirms these tenets and emphasizes the importance of taking a fine-grained perspective to understand the role of culture in RM because of the high degree of heterogeneity across different cultural dimensions and RM linkages. For example, the magnitude of individualism's effect is 71% greater on RM than other cultural dimensions, whereas masculinity has almost no effect; however, accounting only for individualism ignores significant moderating effects of power distance and uncertainty avoidance dimensions. To guide managers, Study 2 adopts a country-level approach and reveals that RM is much more effective outside the United States such that relationships are 55% more effective, on average, for increasing business performance in Brazil, Russia, India, and China.

We propose a summary statistic for the economic well-being of people in a country. Our measure incorporates consumption, leisure, mortality, and inequality, first for a narrow set of countries using detailed micro data, and then more broadly using multi-country datasets. While welfare is highly correlated with GDP per capita, deviations are often large. Western Europe looks considerably closer to the United States, emerging Asia has not caught up as much, and many developing countries are further behind. Each component we introduce plays a significant role in accounting for these differences, with mortality being most important.

The unit values of internationally traded goods are heavily influenced by quality. We model this in an extended monopolistic competition framework where, in addition to choosing price, firms simultaneously choose quality subject to nonhomothetic demand. We estimate quality and quality-adjusted price indexes for 185 countries over 1984–2011. Our estimates are less sensitive to assumptions about the extensive margin of firms than are purely ‘‘demand-side’’ estimates. We find that quality-adjusted prices vary much less across countries than do unit values and, surprisingly, the quality-adjusted terms of trade are negatively related to countries’ level of income.

This paper examines the interaction effects of institutional differences in the cognitive, normative, and regulatory domains on cross-border acquisition and alliance formation. Using a sample of 673 cross-border acquisitions and alliances conducted by multinational corporations (MNCs) from the manufacturing sector of six emerging economies (EEs) over the period 1995-2008, we find significant mimicking (cognitive domain) of local firms' choice of ownership modes by firms. We also find that regulatory distance (regulatory domain) moderates the mimicking of both foreign and local firms while normative distance does not have any moderating effect. These findings contribute to our understanding of how MNCs mimic ownership modes in foreign market entry and how the interaction of this mimetic tendency with other institutional pillars affects these decisions.

We test the hypothesis that information and communication technologies (ICT) polarize labor markets by increasing demand for the highly educated at the expense of the middle educated, with little effect on low-educated workers. Using data on the United States, Japan, and nine European countries from 1980 to 2004, we find that industries with faster ICT growth shifted demand from middle-educated workers to highly educated workers, consistent with ICT-based polarization. Trade openness is also associated with polarization, but this is not robust to controlling for R&D. Technologies account for up to a quarter of the growth in demand for highly educated workers.

We study the determinants of differences in farm size across countries and their impact on agricultural and aggregate productivity using a quantitative sectoral model featuring a distribution of farms. Measured aggregate factors (capital, land, economy-wide productivity) account for one-quarter of the observed differences in farm size and productivity. Policies and institutions that misallocate resources across farms have the potential to account for the remaining differences. Exploiting within-country variation in crop-specific price distortions and their correlation with farm size, we construct a cross-country measure of farm-size distortions which together with aggregate factors accounts for one-half of the cross-country differences in size and productivity.

This article examines the importance of language in international migration from multiple angles by studying the role of linguistic proximity, widely spoken languages, linguistic enclaves and language-based immigration policy requirements. To this aim we collect a unique data set on immigration flows and stocks in 30 OECD destinations from all world countries over the period 1980–2010 and construct a set of linguistic proximity measures. Migration rates increase with linguistic proximity and with English at destination. Softer linguistic requirements for naturalisation and larger linguistic communities at destination encourage more migrants to move. Linguistic proximity matters less when local linguistic networks are larger.