Industrial delicensing which began in 1985 in India marked a discrete break from a past of centrally planned industrial development. Similar liberalization episodes are taking place across the globe. We develop a simple Schumpeterian growth model to understand how Örms respond to the entry threat imposed by liberalization. The model emphasises that Örm responses, even within the same industrial sector, are likely to be heterogeneous leading to an increase in within industry inequality. Technologically advanced Örms and those located in regions with pro-business institutions are more likely to respond to the threat of entry by investing in new technologies and production processes. Empirical analysis using a panel of 3-digit state-industry data from India for the period 1980-1997 conÖrms that delicensing led to an increase in within industry inequality in industrial performance.

We examine how credit constraints affect the cyclical behavior of productivity-enhancing investment and thereby volatility and growth. We first develop a simple growth model where firms engage in two types of investment: a short-term one and a long-term productivity-enhancing one. Because it takes longer to complete, long-term investment has a relatively less procyclical return but also a higher liquidity risk. Under complete financial markets, long-term investment is countercyclical, thus mitigating volatility. But when firms face tight credit constraints, long-term investment turns procyclical, thus amplifying volatility. Tighter credit therefore leads to both higher aggregate volatility and lower mean growth for a given total investment rate. We next confront the model with a panel of countries over the period 1960-2000 and find that a lower degree of financial development predicts a higher sensitivity of both the composition of investment and mean growth to exogenous shocks, as well as a stronger negative effect of volatility on growth.

How does firm entry affect innovation incentives and productivity growth in incumbent firms? Micro-data suggests that there is heterogeneity across industries - incumbents in technologically advanced industries react positively to foreign firm entry, but not in laggard industries. To explain this pattern, we introduce entry into a Schumpeterian growth model with multiple sectors which differ by their distance to the technological frontier. We show that technologically advanced entry threat spurs innovation incentives in sectors close to the technological frontier - successful innovation allows incumbents to prevent entry. In laggard sectors it discourages innovation - increased entry threat reduces incumbents' expected rents from innovating. We find that the empirical patterns hold using rich micro-level productivity growth and patent panel data for the UK, and controlling for the endogeneity of entry by exploiting the large number of policy reforms undertaken during the Thatcher era.

This paper offers empirical evidence that real exchange rate volatility can have a significant impact on long-term rate of productivity growth, but the effect depends critically on a country's level of Önancial development. For countries with relatively low levels of financial development, exchange rate volatility generally reduces growth, whereas for Önancially advanced countries, there is no significant effect. Our empirical analysis is based on an 83 country data set spanning the years 1960-2000; our results appear robust to time window, alternative measures of Önancial development and exchange rate volatility, and outliers. We also o§er a simple monetary growth model in which real exchange rate uncertainty exacerbates the negative investment effects of domestic credit market constraints. Our approach delivers results that are in striking contrast to the vast existing empirical exchange rate literature, which largely Önds the effects of exchange rate volatility on real activity to be relatively small and insignificant.

This paper uses yearly panel data on OECD countries to analyze the relationship between growth and the cyclicality of government debt. We develop new time-varying estimates of the cyclicality of public debt. Our main findings can be summarized as follows: (i) less procyclical public debt growth can have significantly positive effects on productivity growth, in particular when financial development is lower; (ii) public debt growth has become increasingly countercyclical in most OECD countries over the past twenty years, but this trend has been less pronounced in the EMU; (iii) less financially developed or more open economies display less countercyclical public debt growth.

Using three different panel data sets, we show: (i) that mark-ups are significantly higher in South African manufacturing industries than they are in corresponding industries worldwide; (ii) that competition policy (i.e a reduction of mark-ups) should have largely positive effects on productivity growth in South Africa.

In a cross-section of countries, state regulation of labor markets is strongly negatively correlated with the quality of labor relations. In this paper, we argue that these facts reflect different ways to regulate labor markets, either through the state or through the civil society, depending on the degree of cooperation in the economy. We rationalize these facts with a model of learning of the quality of labor relations. Distrustful labor relations lead to low unionization and high demand for direct state regulation of wages. In turn, state regulation crowds out the possibility for workers to experiment negotiation and learn about the potential cooperative nature of labor relations. This crowding out effect can give rise to multiple equilibria: a “good” equilibrium characterized by cooperative labor relations and high union density, leading to low state regulation; and a “bad” equilibrium, characterized by distrustful labor relations, low union density and strong state regulation of the minimum wage.

The foundations of incomplete contracts have been questioned using or extending the subgame perfect implementation approach of Moore and Repullo (1988). We consider the robustness of subgame perfect implementation to the introduction of small amounts of asymmetric information. We show that Moore-Repullo mechanisms may not yield (even approximately) truthful revelation in pure or totally mixed strategies as the amount of asymmetric information goes to zero. Moreover, we argue that a wide class of extensive-form mechanisms are subject to this fragility.

This paper revisits the relationship between health and growth in light of modern endogenous growth theory. We propose an unified framework that encompasses the growth effects of both, the accumulation and the level of health. Based on cross-country regressions where we instrument for both variables, we find that a higher initial level and a higher rate of improvement in life expectancy, both have a significantly positive impact on per capita GDP growth. Then, restricting attention to OECD countries, we find supportive evidence that only the reduction in mortality below age forty generates productivity gains, which in turn may explain why the positive correlation relationship between health and growth in cross-OECD country regressions is weaker over the contemporary period.

We consider the robustness of extensive form mechanisms when common knowledge of the state of Nature is relaxed to common p-beliefs about it. We show that with even an arbitrarily small amount of such uncertainty, the Moore-Repullo mechanism does not yield (even approximately) truthful revelation and in addition there are sequential equilibria with undesirable outcomes. More generally, we show that any extensive form mechanism is fragile in the sense that if a non-monotonic social objective can be implemented with this mechanism, then there are arbitrarily small common p-belief value perturbations under which an undesirable sequential equilibrium exists.