a comparison of alternative covariance matrices for models with over lapping observations abstract this paper investigates the relative performance of alternative covariance matrices for models with over lapping observations commonly used in the finance literature the alternative covariance matrices used are those of hansen 1982 newey and west 1987 bartlett and quadratic spectral qs weights and andrews and monahan 1992 qs weights all matrices produce standard errors which are too small yielding empirical size probabilities above their corresponding theoretical values even in large samples empirical examples such as testing efficiency in the foreign exchange market and mean reversion in stock prices show that the choice of covariance matrix can affect the outcome of a hypothesis test

the computation of world income distribution there is a growing perception of the international economy as an interdependent system the un general assembly s 1974 75 declaration on principles and programs for a change in the international economic order assumes that the welfare of peasants workers businessmen civil servants and political elites in less developed countries ldcs are linked to decisions made by economic policymakers in the industrialized nations many people in ldcs especially elites compare their material levels of living with those of rich countries accordingly there is merit to examining global income distribution because scholars do not have a good technique for aggregating country income distributions into a world income distribution they rarely analyze this distribution this article presents a method of calculating global distribution given a set of national distributions as a sidelight to their work on purchasing power parity kravis heston and summers calculate world 145 nonsocialist countries income distribution but by nations not by households or individuals they assume that each individual receives his gnp per capita table 1

why might the rich be indifferent to income growth of their own countries abstract the paper shows using empirical evidence from more than 100 countries household surveys that income gains that the rich can realize through a more unequal distribution are often much larger than the realistic gains from a distribution neutral growth the rich are thus more likely to support policies that increase inequality than be concerned about income growth of their countries

engel s law diet diversity and the quality of food consumption increasing income brings about a decline in the relative importance of food consumption a wider spread of spending patterns and a demand for higher quality goods using an index number approach this article analyzes these three closely related tendencies stripping out the impact of prices from the dispersion of food expenditures gives a volume based measure of diet diversity that is relevant for nutrition using unpublished data from the world bank s international comparison program for 31 items of food in more than 150 countries we find that diets of rich countries are substantially more diverse than those of the poor and that volumes are the more appropriate way to measure the inequality of diversity the quality of the food basket based on the luxury necessity distinction of consumption increases with income but the elasticity is small there is a modest tendency for the structure of prices to be regressive since prices of luxuries relative to necessities are lower in richer countries additionally our diversity and quality measures are shown to have implications for demand analysis and well being

patterns in three centuries of stock market prices this article applies autoregression and rescaled range statistics to very long stock market series to test the hypothesis that long term temporal dependencies are present in financial data for the annual capital appreciation returns to the london stock exchange evidence of persistence in raw returns greater than five years and of mean reversion in deviations from rolling twenty year averages is found similar patterns are observed for the new york stock exchange however they are not significant at traditional confidence levels copyright 1993 by university of chicago press

long horizon mean reverting stock prices revisited this paper reexamines long horizon stock returns and finds that previous work overstates the evidence of mean reversion the overstatement is largely due to the implicit weighting of ordinary least squares tests which place more weight on the depression and world war ii observations which have both large error variances and stronger mean reverting tendencies additionally the reliance on asymptotic statistics and the improper focus on only the most negative estimates of mean reversion contribute to the overstatement using generalized least squares randomization tests on the 1926 to 1987 period the random walk cannot be rejected for value or equally weighted real returns at any of 10 return horizons or by joint tests over all 10 horizons simultaneously additionally the random walk cannot be rejected for the extended 1871 to 1987 period

the competitiveness of the uk aerospace industry porter s five competitive forces model provides an analytical framework for assessing the uk aerospace industry s competitiveness in this article various statistical indicators are used to measure competitiveness based on published data at the industry and firm level supplemented with information from company interviews the indicators include productivity output firm size development time scales labour hoarding exports and profitability the empirical results of this article suggest that over the period 1980 to 2000 the uk aerospace industry improved its competitiveness compared with the usa and the eu

what rate of return can you reasonably expect or what can the long run tell us about the short run conventional studies of long run returns on capital market assets because of changes in valuation between the starting date and the ending date obscure the basic return each asset earns consequently both absolute returns and measured risk premiums are distorted the basic return can be extracted by selecting widely separated dates with identical valuation levels over nearly 200 years the analysis for equities produced 63 episodes averaging 35 years with a mean nominal basic return of 9 6 percent and standard deviation of 1 6 percent 63 bond episodes averaging 43 years produced a mean nominal basic return of 4 9 percent and standard deviation of 2 3 percent equities revealed a tendency to regress to the mean over time but no such tendency was apparent in the bond data thus long run equity returns were more predictable than long run bond returns this conclusion applies with even greater force to real returns

global inequality of opportunity how much of our income is determined by where we live suppose that all people in the world are allocated only two characteristics over which they have almost no control country of residence and income distribution within that country assume further that there is no migration the authors show that more than one half of variability in income of world population classified according to their household per capita in one percent income groups by country is accounted for by these two characteristics the role of effort or luck cannot play a large role in explaining global distribution of income

the openness equality trade off in global redistribution the gulf cooperation council gcc countries accept massive numbers of migrants from poor countries and pay wages that dramatically improve over outside options but are meagre by the standards of natives as such they do dramatically more per capita to reduce global inequality than do the fortress welfare states of the organisation for economic cooperation and development oecd countries if oecd countries were to imitate the gcc it would reduce global inequality by more than full equalisation within the oecd would such examples suggest a philosophically disturbing trade off between openness to global inequality reducing migration and internal equality

the changing nature of stock and bond volatility this article examines the changing nature of u s stock and bond risk from 1871 through 2000 and the implications for asset allocation using geometric means and standard deviations we examine nominal and inflation adjusted monthly returns over nonoverlapping 5 year periods as well as annual returns over periods of approximately 25 years and we document how stock and bond volatility changed over the period our analysis suggests that the relative change in the volatility of stocks and volatility of bonds over the past 50 years has increased the importance of stocks in asset allocation the change is even more pronounced when inflation is considered

measuring poverty in a growing world or measuring growth in a poor world the extent to which growth reduces global poverty has been disputed for 30 years although there are better data than ever before controversies are not resolved a major problem is that consumption measured from household surveys which is used to measure poverty grows less rapidly than consumption measured in national accounts in the world as a whole and in large countries particularly india china and the united states in consequence measured poverty has fallen less rapidly than appears warranted by measured growth in poor countries one plausible cause is that richer households are less likely to participate in surveys but growth in the national accounts is also upward biased and consumption in the national accounts contains large and rapidly growing items that are not consumed by the poor and not included in surveys so it is possible for consumption of the poor to grow less rapidly than national consumption without any increase in measured inequality current statistical procedures in poor

multilateral resistance to migration the rate of migration observed between two countries does not depend solely on their relative attractiveness but also on the one of alternative destinations following the trade literature we term the influence exerted by other destinations on bilateral flows as multilateral resistance to migration and we show how it can be accounted for when estimating the determinants of migration rates in the context of a general individual random utility maximization model we propose the use of the common correlated effects estimator pesaran 2006 and apply it to high frequency data on the spanish immigration boom between 1997 and 2009 compared to more restrictive estimation strategies developed in the literature the bias goes in the expected direction we find a smaller effect of gdp per capita and a larger effect of migration policies on bilateral rates

investor induced contagion during the banking and european sovereign debt crisis of 2007 2012 wealth effect or portfolio rebalancing this study investigates the way a crisis spreads within a country and across borders by testing the investor induced contagion hypothesis through the liquidity channel on stock bond relationships of the us and five european countries before and during the global banking and european sovereign debt crisis of 2007 2012 we provide evidence consistent with the wealth effect as a source of contagion for the majority of countries nevertheless we uncover evidence of investor induced contagion sourced by the portfolio rebalancing effect for correlations involving spanish and italian bonds during the debt crisis further we find that tight narrow credit spreads reduce magnify the wealth and portfolio rebalancing effects which are offset by the opposite effects of risk aversion amongst investors a dynamic that is not restricted to crisis periods

true measures of gdp and convergence widely used purchasing power parity comparisons of per capita gdp are not true quantity indexes and are subject to systematic substitution bins this bias may distort measurement of convergence and divergence extending varian s nonparametric construction of a true index gives the set of true indexes including the new ideal afriat index these indexes are utility consistent and independent of arbitrary reference price vectors we establish bounds on the dispersion of true multilateral indexes hence bounds on convergence international price indexes understate both true gdp dispersion and where prices are converging over time the rate of true quantity convergence

does federally financed business r d matter for us productivity growth this paper investigates the impact of federally financed business r d on productivity of the us nonfarm business sector results of a cointegration analysis suggest that a long run relation between productivity and total privately and federally financed r d capital stock exists moreover the estimation results do not confirm the finding of previous empirical studies that the productivity effects of federally financed business r d are lower compared with those of privately financed business r d

are stock returns predictable a test using markov chains this paper uses a markov chain model to test the random walk hypothesis of stock prices given a time series of returns a markov chain is defined by letting one state represent high returns and the other represent low returns the random walk hypothesis restricts the transition probabilities of the markov chain to be equal irrespective of the prior years annual real returns are shown to exhibit significant nonrandom walk behavior in the sense that low high returns tend to follow runs of high low returns in the postwar period

a search for long memory in international stock market returns abstract a major issue in financial economics is the behavior of stock returns over long as opposed to short horizons this study provides empirical evidence from the perspective of long memory analysis international evidence on long memory is explored using the morgan stanley capital international stock index data for eighteen countries two tests that are robust to short term dependence and conditional heteroskedasticity are employed a modified rescaled range test and a fractional differencing test the empirical results in general provide little support for long memory in international stock returns the findings are not sensitive to inflation adjustments in stock returns data sources and statistical methods used

efficient market hypothesis evidence from a small open economy this article studies the efficient market hypothesis for the istanbul stock exchange national 100 isen 100 price index within the lumsdaine and papell two structural breaks unit root test framework the main finding of the article shows that the isen 100 index is characterized by a unit root with two structural breaks which is consistent with the efficient market hypothesis in addition the article applies the augmented dickey fuller test runs test and the variance ratio test to test the weak form efficiency of the isen 100 the analyses are repeated for three sub periods delineated in view of the endogenously determined break points

the effects of double counting and expensing on the measured returns to r d this article focuses on the effects of double counting and expensing on the measured returns to r d the contribution of research and development r d to economic growth has been measured in two general ways the first is to compute total factor productivity in a growth accounting framework and to attribute this residual growth to r d the prevailing view is that in the presence of double counting the measured contribution of r d represents the return above and beyond the normal remuneration to traditional capital author demonstrate that this excess returns interpretation eri is essentially correct in the growth accounting framework and that the resulting bias in the measured contribution of r d to growth is large in postwar u s manufacturing the measured residual is biased downward by as much as 30 the expensing bias is downward and reinforces the excess returns bias in this case and the total bias is large in both the growth accounting and econometric contexts the magnitude of the biases may vary across samples and over time there is simply no substitute for properly measured variables

true world income distribution 1988 and 1993 first calculation based on household surveys alone the paper derives world income or expenditure distribution of individuals for two years 1988 and 1993 it is the first paper to calculate world distribution for individuals based entirely on household survey data from 91 countries and adjusted for differences in purchasing power parity between the countries measured by the gini index inequality increased from an already very high 63 in 1988 to 66 in 1993 the increase was driven more by rising differences in mean incomes between the countries than by rising inequalities within countries the most important contributors were rising urban rural differences in china and slow growth of rural incomes in south asia compared to several large developed market economies

the world distribution of income falling poverty and convergence period we estimate the world distribution of income by integrating individual income distributions for 138 countries between 1970 and 2000 country distributions are constructed by combining national accounts gdp per capita to anchor the mean with survey data to pin down the dispersion poverty rates and head counts are reported for four specific poverty lines rates in 2000 were between one third and one half of what they were in 1970 for all four lines there were between 250 and 500 million fewer poor in 2000 than in 1970 we estimate eight indexes of income inequality implied by our world distribution of income all of them show reductions in global inequality during the 1980s and 1990s

where on earth is everybody global matrices of bilateral migrant stocks spanning 1960 2000 are presented disaggregated by gender and based primarily on the foreign born definition of migrants more than one thousand census and population register records are combined to construct decennial matrices corresponding to the five census rounds between 1960 and 2000 for the first time a comprehensive picture of bilateral global migration over the second half of the 20th century emerges the data reveal that the global migrant stock increased from 92 million in 1960 to 165 million in 2000 quantitatively migration between developing countries dominates constituting half of all international migration in 2000 when the partition of india and the dissolution of the soviet union are accounted for migration between developing countries is remarkably stable over the period migration from developing to developed countries is the fastest growing component of international migration in both absolute and relative terms the united states has

nonparametric regression techniques in economics this introduction to nonparametric regression emphasizes techniques that might be most accessible and useful to the applied economist the paper begins with a brief overview of the class of models under study and central theoretical issues such as the curse of dimensionality the bias variance trade off and rates of convergence the paper then focuses on kernel and nonparametric least squares estimation of the nonparametric regression model and optimal differencing estimation of the partial linear model constrained estimation and hypothesis testing is also discussed empirical examples include returns to scale in electricity distribution and hedonic pricing of housing attributes

what do we know about global income inequality in this paper we review the recent literature on global interpersonal income inequality while all estimates agree that the level is very high with a gini of between 0 630 and 0 686 in the 1990s there is no consensus regarding the direction of change we discuss methodological issues including the use of national accounts versus survey based estimates of mean income or consumption and the choice of purchasing power parity exchange rates findings of a rise or fall in global income inequality are not robust across different estimation methods and datasets given the diversity of estimates and various sources of uncertainty including gaps and errors in the underlying data we conclude there is insufficient evidence to determine the direction of change in global interpersonal inequality in recent decades

bringing it all back home return migration and fertility choices summary return migration exerts a wide ranging influence upon the countries of origin of the migrants we analyze whether returnees adjust their fertility choices to the norms that prevail in their previous countries of destination using egyptian household level data egyptian men migrate predominantly toward other arab countries characterized by a higher number of children per woman relying on a two step instrumental variable approach to control for the endogeneity of the migration decisions we show that return migration has a positive and significant influence on marital childbearing

climatic factors as determinants of international migration we examine environmental change as a potential determinant of international migration we distinguish between unexpected short run factors captured by natural disasters as well as long run climate change and climate variability captured by deviations and volatilities of temperatures and rainfall from and around their long run averages starting from a simple neo classical model we use a panel dataset of bilateral migration flows for the period 1960 2000 that allows us to control for numerous time varying and time invariant factors we find no direct impact of climatic change on international migration across our entire sample these results are robust when conditioning on characteristics of origin countries as well as when further considering migrants returning home and the potential endogeneity of our network variable in contrast there is evidence of indirect effects of environmental factors going through wages we further find strong evidence that natural disasters beget greater flows of migrants to urban environs

the assessment the twentieth century achievements failures lessons the past century saw unprecedented rises in life expectancy and living standards it also witnessed major structural changes the rise of big government and two globalizations yet the century s economic history was marred by policy and market failures resulting in a massive world wide depression frequent financial crises particularly in the developing world and several inflation spurts central planning set back development for one third of the world s population transition to the market economy was at best slow in some instances disastrous income distribution within countries changed little while productivity convergence between rich and poor economies was virtually absent policy making learnt some lessons from the 1930s experience particularly in the areas of macroeconomic management international cooperation and free trade dogmatic recipes however were often resorted to at home aided and abetted by the pretensions of the economics profession

a markov model of heteroskedasticity risk and learning in the stock market abstract we examine a variety of models in which the variance of a portfolio s excess return depends on a state variable generated by a first order markov process a model in which the state is known to economic agents is estimated it suggests that the mean excess return moves inversely with the level of risk we then estimate a model in which agents are uncertain of the state the estimates indicate that agents are consistently surprised by high variance periods so there is a negative correlation between movements in volatility and in excess returns

inequality among world citizens 1820 1992 this paper investigates the distribution of well being among world citizens during the last two centuries the estimates show that inequality of world distribution of income worsened from the beginning of the 19th century to world war ii and after that seems to have stabilized or to have grown more slowly in the early 19th century most inequality was due to differences within countries later it was due to differences between countries inequality in longevity also increased during the 19th century but then was reversed in the second half of the 20th century perhaps mitigating the failure of income inequality to improve in the last decades jel d31 f0 n0 o0

unilateral facilitation does not raise international labor migration from the philippines significant income gains from migrating from poorer to richer countries have motivated unilateral source country policies facilitating labor emigration however their effectiveness is unknown the authors conducted a large scale randomized experiment in the philippines testing the impact of unilaterally facilitating international labor migration the most intensive treatment doubled the rate of job offers but had no identifiable effect on international labor migration even the highest overseas job search rate that was induced 22 percent falls far short of the share initially expressing interest in migrating 34 percent the paper concludes that unilateral migration facilitation will at most induce a trickle not a flood of additional emigration

world inequality and globalization the article assesses recent attempts to measure the level and changes in world inequality it compares results based on country averages population weighted inter country gini coefficients and combinations of inter country and intra country distribution figures most measures agree that inequality grew up to 1980 some suggest that it stabilized or declined slightly after that date but that conclusion is not definitive the article argues against reliance on single indicators to measure world inequality as opposed to looking at various measures including inequality between regions and the ratios of incomes of the poor and the rich according to several of these measures inequality has continued to grow the addition of variables other than income life expectancy and education appear to reduce inequality but this is largely an illusion copyright 2004 oxford university press

an analysis of the s p 500 index and cowles s extensions price indexes and stock returns 1870 1999 this article provides a consistent monthly stock price index from january 1871 through 1999 the broadly defined s p weekly index is reconstructed from 1918 and carried forward as the s p 500 composite index to the present cowles s monthly index is improved in order to provide month end estimates from february 1885 cowles s estimates of dividends and earnings for this index from 1871 are reevaluated and are carried forward until spliced to the s p daily estimates that began in 1957 the result is a monthly index of prices dividends and earnings based on consistent definitions over a period of 130 years

the place premium bounding the price equivalent of migration barriers large international differences in the price of labor can be sustained by differences between workers or by natural and policy barriers to worker mobility we use migrant selection theory and evide

global inequality when unequal countries create unequal people abstract current global inequality measures assume that national mean income does not matter to economic welfare at given household income as measured in surveys the paper questions that assumption on theoretical and empirical grounds and finds that prominent stylized facts about global inequality are not robust at one extreme theories of relative deprivation yield nationalistic measures whereby global inequality is average within country inequality which is rising however other theories and evidence point instead to the benefits of living in a richer country parameter values consistent with research on global subjective wellbeing imply higher inequality than prevailing measures though falling since 1990

differentiated assets an experimental study on bubbles i introduction the bubble and crash phenomenon in experimental asset markets first reported in smith suchanek and williams 1988 has been shown to be rather robust to various manipulations in the experimental design see e g king et al 1993 porter and smith 1995 van boening williams and lamaster 1993 1 in all these markets an asset with a life of 15 or 30 periods is traded the asset pays a common dividend to all holders at the end of each trading period and the dividend structure is common knowledge to all traders rather than tracking the fundamental value which is derived from the expected dividend for the number of periods remaining prices tend to exhibit a prolonged boom and crash pattern in a vast majority of the markets studied in the literature note that the bubble and crash phenomenon has also been observed in a setting where two assets are traded in two separate double auction markets simultaneously fisher and kelly 2000 study rate of return parity in such an environment the main treatment variable that they consider is the expected dividends of the assets in some treatments the two assets pay exactly the same expected dividend whereas in some others one asset pays twice as much they find that bubbles not only exist in both markets but also positively correlate with each other childs and mestelman 2006 manipulate the expected dividend as well as the variance of the dividends their findings are consistent with fisher and kelly s in that bubbles occur in both markets and that rate of return parity receives less support as the assets become more differentiated the main objective of this paper is to continue the research line initiated by fisher and kelly 2000 and investigate if and how differences in assets characteristics affect investors trading strategies and as a result the magnitude of bubbles motivated by empirical evidence which suggests that bond markets are in general less susceptible to the dramatic boom and crash price pattern we first construct a bond market like laboratory environment where investors are free to trade assets that can be differentiated not only from their dividend payments but also from their maturity periods 2 the research questions we ask are as follows does the existence of multiple assets that can be differentiated from their dividends and or maturities help reduce mispricing and if so why to tackle these questions we adopt a 2 x 2 design in which an asset called x has a 30 period life duration and pays on average 7 francs per period as a dividend these intrinsic characteristics are fixed in all treatments the characteristics of an alternative asset called y on the other hand vary depending on the treatment it pays either the same expected dividend as x or twice as much in terms of its life duration it lasts either 30 or 15 periods as a result we have the following four treatments for this set of the experiment sdursdiv baseline sdurddiv ddursdiv and ddurddiv where s d dur and div stand for same different duration and dividend respectively if we assume that traders have common and rational expectations we would expect prices to follow fundamental values in both markets but since the evidence of the bubble and crash phenomenon is so overwhelming in the literature we feel that evaluating a hypothesis of no bubbles is a bit insensitive instead we propose the following hypothesis for evaluation hypothesis 1 price deviations from the fundamental in either x or y market do not depend on if and how the two assets are intrinsically different we also evaluate the relative price between the two assets against the prediction of rate of return parity as in fisher and kelly 2000 and childs and mestelman 2006 the null hypothesis that we advance for evaluation is stated as follows hypothesis 2 deviations from the prediction of rate of return parity do not depend on if and how the two assets are intrinsically different

is stock price volatility increasing several different measures of stock price volatility over the period from march 1885 through october 20 1989 indicate that volatility has not increased substantially if one looks at the entire period and that volatility today is much less than it was in the 1930s this holds true whether one considers daily movements within a decade monthly movements within a decade or daily movements over the whole period daily market volatility in the 1980s has been greater than in any decade since 1950 however volatility was unusually low in the 1950s and 1960s furthermore the increase in daily volatility in the 1980s disappears when volatility is measured as month to month percentage changes our perception of volatility is a function of the benchmark used to make comparisons and the time period over which volatility is measured

a unified approach to testing for serial correlation in stock returns this article provides a unified approach for testing serial correlation in stock returns the authors describe a general class of statistics that are linear combinations of consistent estimators of autocorrelations as special cases they show that this class captures many of the statistics studied in the recent finance and macroeconomics literature using this result the authors then provide a common perspective on the asymptotic distribution and power of these statistics copyright 1994 by university of chicago press

inequality in a global perspective the basic story of global inequality in the last three decades has been an overall decline but one which is composed of quite intricate patterns there has been a decline in between country inequality as china and india have grown relative to the us and other rich countries this has been accompanied by an increase in within country inequality but this is itself composed of rising inequality in some countries such as china india and the us and declining inequality in other countries including large economies in latin america section ii of the paper reviews these patterns highlighting country diversity to make the central point that policy matters section iii addresses a normative question what relative weight should be given to within country and between country inequality in making an overall global assessment this section brings on board recent philosophical discourse including on inequality of opportunity in a global frame section iv returns to the policy matters theme and takes up global constraints on national redistribution policy in a globalized world for example a race to the bottom on taxation to attract and keep capital and talent and possible global institutional responses to alleviate these constraints

international spillovers of u s financial volatility abstract we study the international spillover effects of u s bond and stock market volatility using a panel data set of seventeen developed countries we find significant spillover impacts of u s financial market volatility on international output growth volatility of u s bonds with longer maturities is shown to have a more significant impact on international output growth than volatility of u s bonds with shorter maturities regardless of the maturity of the bonds u s financial market volatility is shown to play a larger role statistically in explaining international output growth than a country s own financial market volatility

spillovers from publicly financed r d capital in high tech industries abstract this paper employs a dynamic production model to examine the short run effects of publicly financed r d capital on the cost structure of six high tech us manufacturing industries the results show that given an industry s output publicly financed r d capital reduces the variable production cost in all industries in addition an increase in publicly financed r d causes output to increase implying that producers as well consumers are better off despite the presence of strong monopoly power in some industries a low bound for the social rate of return to publicly financed r d is also calculated

differences in relative prices and international differences in growth rates the new growth literature following paul m romer 1986 and robert e lucas jr 1988 has formulated models in which growth rates can differ systematically across countries a large empirical literature has used cross sectional techniques to examine the cause of international differences in growth rates this paper examines whether this work has used data which have been constructed in such a way as to introduce inadvertently a spurious correlation between growth and income levels this effect occurs because relative prices evolve because of different rates of technological progress in different industries many of the new growth models assume single goods or goods produced by the same technology so this phenomenon has so far escaped analysis if technological progress is more rapid in some sectors than others relative prices will change during the process of development the change of relative prices has two effects on measured growth rates first the choice of base prices affects the growth rate this phenomenon is sometimes called the gerschenkron effect second using any base prices or weights introduces a spurious correlation between income and growth less developed countries would tend to have lower growth rates not because they grew more slowly but because of data construction techniques for the sake of simplicity these phenomena will be called the gerschenkron or the level effect and the spurious correlation effect 3 this paper examines the international comparison program icp and the penn world tables pwt which are based on the icp the penn world tables are the data most widely used in empirical studies of international differences in economic growth both the icp and pwt use international prices to adjust for differences in the purchasing power of currencies these prices most closely resemble hungarian prices using such prices tends to produce time series with lower growth rates than those in the national accounts for countries less developed than hungary conversely the growth rates would be higher for countries more developed than hungary however the growth rates of poorer countries are not systematically lower in the penn world tables the paper examines why the growth rates are not distorted and makes some specific recommendations for data construction and use virginia polytechnic institute and state university blacksburg va 24061 0316 part of this work was supported by a grant from the institute of international studies at brown university and by a summer internship at the division of international finance at the federal reserve board i am grateful to peter garber david weil oded galor and anonymous referees for helpful comments alan heston and robert summers have also helped me understand icp and pwt methodology of course i alone am responsible for any mistakes in this paper iexamples include steve dowrick and duc tho nguyen 1989 robert j barro 1991 j bradford de long and lawrence h summers 1991 and n gregory mankiw et al 1992 2a series of papers by christina d romer 1986a b 1989 has already emphasized the importance of data construction techniques in another context 3there is a third effect a real acceleration effect caused by shifting consumption patterns and the reallocation of resources between sectors growth accountants such as angus maddison 1987 adjust estimates of total factor productivity for this sort of shift william j baumol et al 1989 have also referred to this phenomenon for an analysis in terms of a simple multisector solow model see nuxoll 1992a

the elasticity of the migrant labour supply evidence from temporary filipino migrants the effect of immigration on host and origin countries is mediated by the way migrants take their labour supply decisions we propose a simple way of integrating the traditional random utility maximisation model used to analyse location decisions with a classical labour demand function at destination our setup allows us to estimate a general upper bound on the elasticity of the migrant labour supply that we take to the data using the evolution of the numbers and wages of temporary overseas filipino workers between 1992 and 2009 to different destinations we find that the migrant labour supply elasticity can be very large temporary migrants are very reactive to economic conditions in their potential destinations