Knowledge that Transforms

This paper examines how socioeconomic stratification and alternative systems of education finance affect inequality and growth. Agents interact through local public goods or externalities (school funding, neighborhood effects) and economywide linkages (complementary skills, knowledge spillovers). Sorting families into homogeneous communities often minimizes the costs of existing heterogeneity but mixing reduces heterogeneity faster. Integration, therefore, tends to slow down growth in the short run yet raise it in the long run. A move to state funding of education presents society with a similar intertemporal trade-off. Local and global complementarities play major roles in determining the efficient social and educational structures.

The authors examine conditions under which 'Veblen effects' arise from the desire to achieve social status by signaling wealth through conspicuous consumption. While Veblen effects cannot ordinarily arise when preferences satisfy a 'single-crossing property, ' they may emerge when this property fails. In that case, 'budget' brands are priced at marginal cost, while 'luxury' brands, though not intrinsically superior, are sold at higher prices to consumers seeking to advertise wealth. Luxury brands earn strictly positive profits under conditions that would, with standard formulations of preferences, yield marginal-cost pricing. The authors explore factors that induce Veblen effects and they investigate policy implications.

The quantitative implications of labor-market search for economic fluctuations are evaluated in the context of a real-business-cycle model. Incorporating labor-market search into the model is found to improve its empirical performance along several dimensions. In particular, hours now fluctuate substantially more than wages and the contemporaneous correlation between hours and productivity falls. In addition, the model replicates the observation that output growth displays positive autocorrelation at short horizons. Overall, the empirical results suggest that the labor-market-search environment embodies a quantitatively important propagation mechanism.

This paper explores how multinationals affect underdeveloped regions through the generation of linkages. It is shown that the linkage effect of multinationals on the host country is more likely to be favorable when the good that multinationals produce uses intermediate goods intensively, when there are large costs of communication between the headquarters and the production plant, and when the home and host countries are not too different in terms of the variety of intermediate goods produced. If these conditions are reversed, then multinationals could even hurt the developing economy, formalizing the idea that multinationals may create enclave economies within developing countries.

Regularities concerning how entry, exit, market structure, and innovation vary from the birth of technologically progressive industries through maturity are summarized. A model emphasizing differences in firm innovative capabilities and the importance of firm size in appropriating the returns from innovation is developed to explain the regularities. The model also explains regularities regarding the relationship within industries between firm size and firm innovative effort, innovative productivity, cost, and profitability. It predicts that over time firms devote more effort to process innovation but the number of firms and the rate and diversity of product innovation eventually wither.

Do well-functioning stock markets and banks promote long-run economic growth? This paper shows that stock market liquidity and banking development both positively, predict growth, capital accumulation, and productivity improvements when entered together in regressions, even after controlling for economic and political factors. The results are consistent with the views that financial markets provide important services for growth, and that stock markets provide different services from banks. The paper also finds that stock market size, volatility, and integration with world markets are not robustly linked with growth, and that none of the financial indicators is closely associated with private saving rates. (JEL G00 O16 F36) Considerable debate exists on the relationships between the financial system and economic growth. Historically, economists have focused on banks. Walter Bagehot (1873) and Joseph Schumpeter (1912) emphasize the critical importance of the banking system in economic growth and highlight circumstances when banks can actively spur innovation and future growth by identifying and funding productive investments. In contrast, Robert E. Lucas (1988) states that economists 'badly overstress'

This paper examines whether financial development facilitates economic growth by scrutinizing one rationale for such a relationship; that financial development reduces the costs of external finance to firms. Specifically, we ask whether industrial sectors that are relatively more in need of external finance develop disproportionately faster in countries with more developed financial markets. We find this to be true in a large sample of countries over the 1980s. We show this result is unlikely to be driven by omitted variables, outliers, or reverse causality. (JEL O4, F3, G1) A large literature, dating at least as far back as Joseph A. Schumpeter (1911), emphasizes the positive influence of the development of a country's financial sector on the level and the rate of growth of its per capita income. The argument essentially is that the services the financial sector provides -- of reallocating capital to the highest value use without substantial risk of loss through moral hazard, adverse ...