Empirical data show that firms tend to improve their ranking in the productivity distribution over time. A sticky-price model with firm-level productivity growth fits this data and predicts that the optimal long-run inflation rate is positive and between 1.5% and 2% per year. In contrast, the...

Unlike in Asia, the manufacturing sector has not (yet) become a driver of structural change in Africa. One common explanation is that the natural resource-focus of many African economies leads to Dutch disease effects. To test this argument for the case of newly found oil in Ghana we develop a...

In this paper, we present a standard quality ladders endogenous growth model with one significant new assumption, that it takes time for firms to learn how to export. We show that this model without Melitz-type assumptions can account for all the evidence that the Melitz (2003) model was...

I develop a model of endogenous economic growth and search and matching frictions in the labor market. I study the effect of trade liberalization between two identical economies on unemployment. I solve for two versions of the growth model, the first one where trade liberalization has only a...

Regional output per worker has converged across Chinese provinces in 1979- 1989. The estimated rate of convergence is 2.2 percent. This rate of convergence can be explained by neoclassical growth model conditional on assumptions about factor mobility and production elasticities. My empirical...

Openness appears to have a strong impact on economic growth especially in DCs, which typically exhibit a high share of physical capital in factor income and a low share of labor. In the neoclassical growth model with partial capital mobility, physical capital?s share in factor income determines...

This paper constructs a two-sector unified growth model that explains the timing and the inevitability of an industrial revolution through entrepreneurs' role for the accumulation of useful knowledge. While learning-by-doing in agriculture eventually allows the preindustrial economy to leave its...

In this work we update the reviews on endogenous growth theories, after two decades of theoretical and empirical contributions in order to explore whether recent empirical studies have become more supportive of their main predictions. Among the core topics studied in the growth econometric...