Three Essays in Macroeconomics with a Focus on Economic Growth, Monetary Policy and Knowlege Dissemination

This thesis includes three essays on empirical macroeconomics. The first chapter applies modern ideas-oriented growth accounting, based on the semi-endogenous growth theory of Jones (2002), to compare the sources of Canadian and U.S. economic growth between 1981-2014. Two features stand out in comparison to the U.S. growth experience over the same period. First, over a full percentage point of the average U.S. growth of 1.64 percent is due to excess ideas growth. Second, the constant growth view' that reconciles large sources of transitional growth with relatively stable average growth is not supported in Canada.The second chapter of this thesis examines the empirical link between movements in interest rates and capacity utilization, using 2SLS fixed effects estimations in a panel setting of 21 U.S. manufacturing industries between 1975-2011. The study arrives at three main findings: (a) In most industries a cut in the interest rate does not simultaneously stimulate capacity utilization; (b) in contrast to previous studies, the results do not show evidence that durable-goods industries are more sensitive to interest rate changes than other industries are; and (c) in many industries, the interest rate and capacity utilization move in the same direction. This suggests that manufacturers initially respond to interest-rate shocks by adjusting the utilization of their current capital stock.The final chapter of this thesis investigates the impact of the home country's levels of income, civil liberties and political rights on the spillover effects of technical and managerial innovation using pooled mean group estimations in a dynamic heterogeneous panel setting of 60 countries between 1996--2014. The findings show that, for high-income countries, domestic innovations in management are a significant source of change in productivity. In contrast, the results do not support the role of the domestic development of management innovation in middle-income countries. Regardless of which metric is utilized in the analysis, national spillovers of management ideas increase the productivity of countries with the most-liberal democratic regimes. In democratic countries where the regime is only partially liberal, domestic management innovations have a depressing effect on productivity.