Knowledge that Transforms

This paper determines when a debt contract will be monitored by lenders. This is the choice between borrowing directly (issuing a bond, without monitoring) and borrowing through a bank that monitors to alleviate moral hazard. This provides a theory of bank loan demand and of the role of monitoring in circumstances in which reputation effects are important. A key result is that borrowers with credit ratings toward the middle of the spectrum rely on bank loans, and in periods of high interest rates or low future profitability, higher-rated borrowers choose to borrow from banks.

We examine the connection between exchange rates and foreign direct investment that arises when globally integrated capital markets are subject to informational imperfections. These imperfections cause external financing to be more expensive than internal financing, so that changes in wealth translate into changes in the demand for direct investment. By systematically lowering the relative wealth of domestic agents, a depreciation of the domestic currency can lead to foreign acquisitions of certain domestic assets. We develop a simple model of this phenomenon and test for its relevance in determining international capital flows.

Using an endogenous growth model in which learning by doing, although bounded in each good, exhibits spillovers across goods, this paper investigates the dynamic effects of international trade. Examining an LDC and a DC, the latter distinguished by a higher initial level of knowledge, under autarky and free trade, I find that under free trade the LDC (DC) experiences rates of technical progress and GOP growth less than or equal (greater than or equal) to those enjoyed under autarky. Unless the LDC's population is several orders of magnitude greater than that of the DC and the initial technical gap between the two economies is not large, the LDC will be unable to catch up with its trading partner. Hence, in terms of technical progress and growth, the LDC experiences dynamic losses from trade, whilst the DC experiences dynamic gains. However, since technical progress abroad can improve welfare at home, LDC consumers may enjoy - higher intertemporal utility along the free trade path. In the case of DC consumers, as long as their economy is not overtaken by the LDC they will enjoy both more rapid technical progress and the traditional static gains from trade, and hence experience an unambiguous improvement in intertemporal welfare.

We develop a two-country model of endogenous innovation and imitation in order to study the interactions between these two processes. Firms in the North race to bring out the next generation of a set of technology-intensive products. Each product potentially can be improved a countably infinite number of times, but quality improvements require the investment of resources and entail uncertain prospects of success. In the South entrepreneurs invest resources in order to learn the production processes that have been developed in the North. All R&D investment decisions are made by forward-looking, profit-maximizing entrepreneurs. The steady-state equilibrium is characterized by constant aggregate rates of innovation and imitation. We study how these rates respond to changes in the sizes of the two regions and to policies in each region to promote learning.

A country's most talented people typically organize production by others, so they can spread their ability advantage over a larger scale. When they start firms, they innovate and foster growth, but when they become rent seekers, they only redistribute wealth and reduce growth. Occupational choice depends on returns to ability and to scale in each sector, on market size, and on compensation contracts. In most countries, rent seeking rewards talent more than entrepreneurship does, leading to stagnation. Our evidence shows that countries with a higher proportion of engineering college majors grow faster; whereas countries with a higher proportion of law concentrators grow slower.

For 98 countries in the period 1960-1985, the growth rate of real per capita GDP is positively related to initial human capital (proxied by 1960 school-enrollment rates) and negatively related to the initial (1960) level of real per capita GDP. Countries with higher human capital also have lower fertility rates and higher ratios of physical investment to GDP. Growth is inversely related to the share of government consumption in GDP, but insignificantly related to the share of public investment. Growth rates are positively related to measures of political stability and inversely related to a proxy for market distortions. In neoclassical growth models, such as Solow [1956], Cass [1965], and Koopmans [1965], a country's per capita growth rate tends to be inversely related to its starting level of income per person. In particular, if countries are similar with respect to structural parameters for preferences and technology, then poor countries tend to grow faster than rich countries. Thus, there is a force that promotes convergence in levels of per capita income across countries.' The main element behind the convergence result in neoclassi-cal growth models is diminishing returns to reproducible capital. Poor countries, with low ratios of capital to labor, have high marginal products of capital and thereby tend to grow at high rates. ' This tendency for low-income countries to grow at high rates is reinforced in extensions of the neoclassical models that allow for international mobility of capital and technology. The hypothesis that poor countries tend to grow faster than rich countries seems to be inconsistent with the cross-country evidence, which indicates that per capita growth rates have little

Using data from the United Nations Comparison Project and the Penn World Table, we find that machinery and equipment investment has a strong association with growth: over 1960–1985 each extra percent of GDP invested in equipment is associated with an increase in GDP growth of one third of a percentage point per year. This is a much stronger association than found between growth and any of the other components of investment. A variety of considerations suggest that this association is causal, that higher equipment investment drives faster growth, and that the social return to equipment investment in well-functioning market economies is on the order of 30 percent per year.

The analysis that follows tests the shirking model of efficiency wages by examining the relationship between rates of employee discipline and relative wage premiums across plants within the same firm. The structure of this data set controls for many of the problems that confound other tests of efficiency wage arguments, and the results suggest that greater wage premiums are associated with lower levels of shirking as measured by disciplinary dismissals. Shirking and discipline are also lower where conditions in the labor market raise the costs associated with shirking by making it more difficult to find alternative employment. It is less clear, however, whether the wage in this case is necessarily efficient in the sense of generating reductions in discipline sufficient to offset the costs of the wage premium.

Raaj K. Sah, Joseph E. Stiglitz; The Quality of Managers in Centralized Versus Decentralized Organizations*, The Quarterly Journal of Economics, Volume 106, Iss

The Penn World Table displays a set of national accounts economic time series covering many countries. Its expenditure entries are denominated in a common set of prices in a common currency so that real quantity comparisons can be made, both between countries and over time. It also provides information about relative prices within and between countries, as well as demographic data and capital stock estimates. This updated, revised, and expanded Mark 5 version of the table includes more countries, years, and variables of interest to economic researchers. The Table is available on personal computer diskettes and through BITNET.