Research Database

This paper shows how standard methods can be used to formulate and estimate a dynamic index model for random fields—stochastic processes indexed by time and cross section where the time-series and cross-section dimensions are comparable in magnitude. We use these to study dynamic comovements of sectoral employment in the U.S. economy. The dynamics of employment in sixty sectors is well explained using only two unobservable factors; those factors are also strongly correlated with GNP growth.

Latin American countries are the only Western countries that are poor and that aren’t gaining ground on the United States. This article evaluates why Latin America has not replicated Western economic success. We find that this failure is primarily due to total factor productivity (TFP) differences. Latin America’s TFP gap is not plausibly accounted for by human capital differences, but rather reflects inefficient production. We argue that competitive barriers are a promising channel for understanding low Latin TFP. We document that Latin America has many more international and domestic competitive barriers than do Western and successful East Asian countries. We also document a number of microeconomic cases in Latin America in which large reductions in competitive barriers increase productivity to Western levels.