We develop an endogenous growth model in which new technology and new skills are bounded complements they complement each other up to a point, but beyond this the impact of each factor is constrained by the level of the other. As a result, both technological progress and human capital...

A decomposition of aggregate labor productivity based on internationally comparable data from FAO and Penn World Tables reveals that high labor shares and low productivity in agriculture are mainly responsible for poor countries<92> current position in the world income distribution. Using a...</92>

We develop a quantitative theory of human capital investment in order to evaluate the magnitude of cross-country differences in total factor productivity (TFP) that explains the variation in per-capita incomes across countries. We build a heterogeneous-agent economy with cross-sectional...

We document the substantial process of structural transformation -the reallocation of labor between agriculture, manufacturing, and services- and aggregate productivity growth undergone by Portugal between 1956 and 1995. In this paper, we assess the quantitative role of sectoral productivity in...

This paper re-examines Earl Hamilton's famous 1929 thesis on 'Profit Inflation' and the 'birth of modern industrial capitalism': namely, that the inflationary forces of the Price Revolution era produced a widening gap between prices and wages, thus providing industrial entrepreneurs with...

We investigate the role of sectoral differences in labor productivity and the process of structural transformation (the secular reallocation of labor across sectors) in accounting for the time path of aggregate productivity across countries. Using a simple model of the structural transformation...

This paper provides an overview of the evolution of income inequality in China from 1987 to 2002, employing three series of data sets. Our focus is on both urban and rural inequality, as well as the urban-rural gap, with the objective of summarizing several “first-order” empirical patterns...

We investigate the role of sectoral differences in labor productivity in explaining the process of structural transformation - the secular reallocation of labor across sectors - and the time path of aggregate productivity across countries. Using a simple model of the structural transformation...

We formulate a version of the growth model in which production is carried out by heterogeneous plants and calibrate it to US data. In the context of this model we argue that differences in the allocation of resources across heterogeneous plants may be an important factor in accounting for...

I develop a growth model where output can be produced with a modern and a traditional technology. The traditional technology has a lower TFP and a lower share of reproducible capital than the modern technology. In this simple framework, barriers to capital accumu-lation affect the extent to...