How important is luck in labor market outcomes? This paper uses a new dataset of all international test cricketers who debuted between 1950 and 1985 to address this question. We present evidence that a player’s debut performance is strongly affected by an exogenous source of variation: whether...

The development accounting literature almost always assumes a Cobb-Douglas (CD) production function. However, if in reality the elasticity of substitution between capital and labor deviates substantially from 1, the assumption is invalid, potentially casting doubt on the commonly held view that...

Kurzarbeit (KA), Germany's short-time work program, is widely credited with saving jobs and supporting domestic demand during the COVID-19 recession. We quantify the impact by exploiting state-level variation in exposure to the pandemic shock and KA take-up. We construct a shift-share measure of...

While standard demand factors perform well in predicting historical trade patterns, they fail conspicuously in 2020, when pandemic-specific factors played a key role above and beyond demand. Prediction errors from a multilateral import demand model in 2020 vary systematically with the health...

In this paper we develop a model of invention and knowledge-diffusion. We show, in a setting of imperfect knowledge-transfers from one generation to the next, that there is a tension between the tendency for old knowledge to be lost on the one hand, and the tendency for preserved knowledge to be...

This paper explores the idea that LDCs may face a human capital constraint in terms of having insufficient numbers of suitably educated people to be able to take advantage of technological innovations in the rich world. Technologically advanced sectors which operate under increasing returns to...

We posit that the relationship between income inequality and economic growth ismediated by the level of equality of opportunity, which we identify with intergenerationalmobility. In economies characterized by intergenerational rigidities, an increase in incomeinequality has persistent...

Our paper analyzes the causal links between human capital accumulation and growth in total factor productivity (TFP). In particular, it tests the Nelson-Phelps hypothesis that human capital is crucial in enabling the imitation of technologies developed at the frontier. To this end we calculate...

Evidence abounds on the propagation of financial stresses originating in the US mortgage market to banking systems worldwide through international funding markets. But the transmission of this external funding shock to the real economy via bank lending is surprisingly under-examined, given the...

The “middle-income trap” is the phenomenon of hitherto rapidly growing economies stagnating at middle-income levels and failing to graduate into the ranks of high-income countries. In this study we examine the middle-income trap as a special case of growth slowdowns, which are identified as...