The validity of the Hotelling’s rule, the fundamental theorem of nonrenewable resource economics, is limited by its partial equilibrium nature. One symptom of this limitation may be the disagreement between the empirical evidence, showing stable or declining resource prices, and the rule,...

This paper builds a model of growth through industrialization, where machines replace workers in a growing number of tasks. This enables the economy to experience long-run growth, as machines become servants of humans, and as their number grows unboundedly. The mechanism that drives growth is...

We develop a theory to explain the transition from stagnation to modern growth. We focus on the forces that shaped the evolution of total factor productivity in agriculture and manufacturing across history. More specifically, we build a multisector model of endogenous technical-change and...

This paper views technical change as a labor-saving, but capital-using, mechanization process, whereby capital replaces labor; though within any given technique, factors have a limited ability to substitute one another. This is formalized by reinterpreting the “distribution-parameters” of a...

Why did England industrialize first? And why was Europe ahead of the rest of the world? Unified growth theory in the tradition of Galor-Weil (2000) and Galor-Moav (2002) captures the key features of the transition from stagnation to growth over time. Yet we know remarkably little about why...

This paper develops a dynamic general equilibrium model of North-South trade and economic growth in a world economy with a continuum of countries. Countries are different in research productivity. Innovation, imitation and the relative wage between countries are endogenously determined as well...

We present a semi-endogenous model of regional growth and development without scale effects. In this model of a small developing region the world growth rate of technical progress is given. Regional growth is driven by technological change induced by imitation. Imitation is determined by...

We consider a two-sector economy, where public infrastructure unevenly affects the productivity of the sectors. Private and public capital are produced with different technologies, and the sector producing the infrastructure is not benefiting from its services. The government provides both...

Growth accounting exercises point to aggregate TFP differences as the dominant source of the large cross-country income differences. In this paper, I ask which sectors account for the aggregate TFP gap between rich and poor countries. Data limitations for developing countries have led...

Despite the widely recognised importance of the manufacturing industry for successful development relatively few studies empirically investigate this sector in cross-country analysis. In this paper we attempt to fill this gap in the literature by investigating manufacturing production across a...