We combine data on trade, production, and input use to document changes in the value added content of trade between 1970 and 2009. The ratio of value-added to gross exports fell by roughly 10 percentage points worldwide. The ratio declined 20 percentage points in manufacturing, but rose in...

According to national accounts data, value added per worker is much higher in the non-agricultural sector than in agriculture in the typical country, and particularly so in developing countries. Taken at face value, this "agricultural productivity gap" suggests that labor is greatly misallocated...

We combine data on trade, production, and input use to compute the value added content of trade for forty-two countries from 1970 to 2009. For the world, the ratio of value added to gross trade falls by ten to fifteen percentage points, with two-thirds of this decline in the last two decades....

We estimate the long-term effect of public R&D on growth in manufacturing by analyzing new data from the Cold War era Space Race. We develop a novel empirical strategy that leverages US-Soviet rivalry in space technology to isolate windfall R&D spending. Our results demonstrate that public R&D...