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WORKING PAPERS
April 04, 2024
Star firms, defined as the top 10 percentile of firms in the world in terms of return on invested capital, are more likely to occur in high-income countries and manufacturing industry, but there is an increasing share of star firms from middle-income countries and the services sector. Star firms hav...
WORKING PAPERS
April 02, 2024
Starting in 2001, duty-free access to U.S. markets under the African Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA) led to a brief boom in African manufacturing exports, particularly apparel, which then fizzled in the face of unfettered Chinese competition after 2005. The looming expiration of AGOA—and eroding C...
WORKING PAPERS
February 08, 2024
A fracturing of the institutional infrastructure undergirding globalization would harm efforts to cope with urgent national problems and international crises. The imperative for the leading economic powers is to defuse threats to globalization and to promote resilience of global value chains. The fl...
WORKING PAPERS
August 29, 2023
The war in Ukraine was associated with large changes in the prices of key food and fuel commodities in 2022 which produced macroeconomic gains for exporters and losses as import costs increased. Across 49 countries benefitting, these gains averaged about 8 percent of GDP and reach up to 36 percent o...
WORKING PAPERS
April 21, 2022
Education is one of the most important public goods provided by modern governments. Yet governments worldwide seldom perform well in the sector. This raises the question: Why do governments preside over poor education quality? This paper answers this question with evidence from Tanzania.
WORKING PAPERS
February 23, 2022
We use comparable, survey-based literacy tests for repeated cross-sections of men and women born between 1950 and 2000 to study education outcomes across cohorts in 87 countries. We find that education quality, defined as literacy conditional on completing five years of schooling, stagnated or decli...
WORKING PAPERS
May 04, 2021
Students around the world lack foundational literacy and numeracy skills at striking rates. This essay examines the potential channels by which FLN investments and skills—which most systems teach in the early grades of primary school—may impact later schooling and subsequent life outcomes and t...
WORKING PAPERS
December 17, 2020
Cash transfers boost educational outcomes for poor children on average, but which aspects of educational performance are most responsive and which poor children benefit the most? This study examines the educational impacts of cash transfers, drawing on a randomized, community implemented conditional...
WORKING PAPERS
July 10, 2020
We highlight a lesser known consequence of China’s growth and integration into the world economy in relation to the United States: the rise of services trade. We demonstrate that the US’s trade deficit in goods cycle back as a surplus in exports of education services. Focusing on China’s accession t...