Peer-reviewed journal articles

We compare supermarket price setting in the US and the euro area and assess its impact on food inflation. We find that both higher frequency and stronger state dependence of price changes contribute to higher flexibility of supermarket inflation in the US relative to the euro area.

We employ growth accounting and data from the 2019 release of the EUKLEMS database to systematically quantify the primary contributors to value-added and labor productivity growth within the Information and Communication Technology Manufacturing (ICTM) industry across 13 industrialized economies between 2000 and 2015. Our analysis reveals that total factor productivity, labor quality, investments in software, and research and development emerge as the primary drivers of growth.

This study provides novel evidence on this insight by examining the effect of a change in fossil fuel subsidies on the manufacturing industry of an oil-rich Middle Eastern economy. Using a novel firm-level micro data set on Omani manufacturing enterprises, our work shows that increases in fossil fuel energy factor prices lead to improvements in productivity as well as efficiency and notable business upgrading. Our work indicates that subsidy reforms may not only be used to achieve environmental goals but may also drive upgrading and modernization processes of firms that can, ultimately, also improve economic performance.

This paper examines the dynamics of deindustrialization in developed countries during the 1970–2015 period. The paper shows that deindustrialization is a persistent pattern that experienced a significant structural change in the post-1990 period, in which the acceleration of globalization with the rise of North-South trade appeared to have a significant effect.

This paper offers a straightforward and descriptive contribution to the recent and busy debate on fiscal discipline made popular by the seminal Reinhart and Rogoff (2010; Growth in a time of debt. American Economic Review, vol. 100, no. 2, 573–78) paper. We find that with further hindsight, and from a time series perspective, there is little to no support for the view that higher levels of debt cause reductions in economic activity. In contrast to Reinhart and Rogoff (2010), we suggest that economic slumps tend to cause debt build-ups rather than vice versa.

This paper uses an empirical approach to test the specific causal relationship between debt and growth in the UK, in the context of the debate surrounding the use of a policy known as austerity measures. We find no evidence of a causal relationship between economic growth and public debt for the UK.