We study the effects of the adoption of new agricultural technologies on structural transformation. To guide empirical work, we present a simple model where the effect of agricultural productivity on industrial development depends on the factor bias of technical change. We test the predictions...

Building on the idea that members of religious communities insure each other against some idiosyncratic risks, we argue that religious communities should be more widespread where populations face greater common risk. Our empirical analysis exploits rainfall risk as a source of common...

We propose a model in which economic relations and institutions in advanced and less developed economies differ as these societies have access to different amounts of information. This lack of information makes it hard to give the right incentives to managers and entrepreneurs. We argue that...

In the absence of comparable macroeconomic indicators for most of the Latin American economies before the 1930s, the apparent consumption of energy is used in this paper as a proxy of the degree of modernisation of Latin America and the Caribbean. This paper presents an estimate of the apparent...

We use the recent introduction of biofuels to study the effect of industry factors on the relationships between wholesale commodity prices. Correlations between agricultural products and oil are strongest in the 2005-09 period, coinciding with the boom of biofuels, and remain substantial until...

In absence of comparable macroeconomic indicators for most of the Latin American economies beyond the 1930s, this paper presents an estimate of the apparent consumption per head of coal and petroleum for 25 countries of Latin American and the Caribbean for the year 1925, doubling the number of...

The adoption and diffusion of inputs in the production network is at the heart of technological progress. What determines which inputs are initially considered and eventually adopted by innovators? We examine the evolution of input linkages from a network perspective, starting from a stylized...

Latin America participated in the electric revolution which profoundly transformed the most developed Western economies between 1880 and 1930. The electrification of Latin America began relatively soon after these economies, but it was incapable of keeping up with them. Public electric lighting...

We construct and estimate a unified model combining three of the main sources of cross-country income disparities: differences in factor endowments, barriers to technology adoption and the inappropriateness of frontier technologies to local conditions. The key components are different types of...

This paper evaluates the global welfare impact of China's trade integration and technological change in a multi-country quantitative Ricardian-Heckscher-Ohlin model. We simulate two alternative growth scenarios: a "balanced" one in which China's productivity grows at the same rate in each...