What major insights have emerged from development economics in the past decade, and how do they matter for the World Bank? This challenging question was recently posed by World Bank Group President David Malpass to the staff of the Development Research Group. This paper assembles a set of 13...

Estimates of labor mobility costs are needed to assess the responses of employment and wages to trade shocks when factor adjustment is costly. Available methods to estimate those costs rely on panel data, which are seldom available in developing countries. The authors propose a method to...

The research and development (R&D) sector is considered one of the main driving forces of sustainable growth in the long run. The sector, however, also shows excessive volatility which raises interesting questions regarding the sources of this volatility as well as the nature of the relation...