This paper presents a model of social learning about the suitability of local conditions for new business ventures and explores its implications for the microeconomic patterns of economic development. I show that: i) firms tend to 'rush' into business ventures with which other firms have had...

The net entry contribution to aggregate productivity growth has increased dramatically in the UK over 1990saccording to calculations based on data from the Annual Respondents Database (ARD). Some recent studieshave tried to link this to other structural changes over the same period such as...

This paper investigates the impact of outsourcing on sectoral reallocation in the U.S. over the period 1948-2002. Roughly 40% of the growth of the service sector comes from professional and business services. This is an unusual industry as more than 90% of its output is an intermediate input to...

We study a multi-sector model of growth with differences in TFP growth rates across sectorsand derive sufficient conditions for the coexistence of a balanced aggregate growth path, withall aggregates growing at the same rate, and structural change, characterized by sectoral laborreallocation....

We study long-run trends in market hours of work and employment shifts across economic sectors driven by uneven TFP growth in market and home production. We focus on the structural transformation between agriculture, manufacturing and services and on the marketization of home production. The...

This paper studies how differences in the size of barriers to capital accumulation can account for differences in long run economic development paths. In this model barriers affect both the beginning date and the pace of the modern economic growth. A fundamental property of the model is that...

Many cultural products have the same nonrival nature as scientific knowledge. They therefore face identical difficulties in creation and dissemination. One traditional view says market failure is endemic: societies tolerate monopolistic inefficiency in intellectual property (IP) protection to...

I examine the dynamic evolutions of unemployment, hours of work and the service share since the war in the United States and Europe. The theoretical model brings together all three and emphasizes technological growth. Computations show that the very low unemployment in Europe in the 1960s was...

We draw attention to the role of economic geography in explaining important cross-sectional facts which are difficult to account for in existing models of industrialization. By construction, closed-economy models that stress the role of local demand in generating sufficient expenditure on...

For the last decade we have been using double-blind survey techniques and randomized sampling to construct management data on over 10,000 organizations across twenty countries. On average, we find that in manufacturing American, Japanese, and German firms are the best managed. Firms in...