Recent evidence suggests that recessions play a crucial role in promoting automation and the reallocation of productive resources. Consistent with this, I show that in the three previous Canadian recessions, routine jobs were disproportionately lost. COVID-19 is likely to have a similar impact,...

Sustained economic growth in England can be traced back to the early seventeenth century. That earlier growth, albeit modest, both generated and was sustained by a demographic regime that entailed relatively high wages, and by an increasing endowment of human capital in the form of a relatively...