Research Database

Despite wide recognition of their significant role in explaining sustained growth and economic development, uncompensated knowledge spillovers have not yet been fully modeled with a microeconomic foundation. The main purpose of this paper is to illustrate the exchange of knowledge as well as its consequences on agglomerative activity in a general-equilibrium search-theoretic framework. Agents, possessing differentiated types of knowledge, search for partners to exchange ideas and create new knowledge in order to improve production efficacy. When individuals’ types of knowledge are too diverse, a match is less likely to generate significant innovations. We demonstrate the extent of agglomeration has significant implications for the patterns of information flows in economies. Further, by simultaneously determining the patterns of knowledge exchange and the spatial agglomeration of an economy we identify additional channels for interaction between agglomerative activity and knowledge exchange. Finally, contrary to previous work in spatial agglomeration, our model suggests that agglomerative environments may be either under-specialized and under-populated or over-specialized and over-populated relative to the social optimum.

This essay concerns how the Federal Reserve’s role as a payment services provider can best be aligned with its broad mission to foster the integrity, efficiency, and accessibility of the U.S. payments system. A recommended strategy involves specialization in providing services where the central bank has a comparative advantage—notably, services directly related to providing a comprehensive, secure system of accounts for interbank settlement and potentially some additional services justified by economies of scope. If markets for other payment services evolve as expected, the recommended strategy would have the Fed generally rely on means other than direct service provision to help ensure that services are provided effectively and equitably. Several specific implications of this strategy are suggested.

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.