This paper studies a growth model that is able to match several key facts of economic history. For thousands of years, the average standard of living seems to have risen very little, despite increases in the level of technology and large increases in the level of the population. Then, after...

New ideas are often combinations of existing goods or ideas, a point emphasized by Romer (1993) and Weitzman (1998). A separate literature highlights the links between exponential growth and Pareto distributions: Gabaix (1999) shows how exponential growth generates Pareto distributions, while...

Ideas are different from nearly all other economic goods in that they are nonrivalrous. This nonrivalry implies that production possibilities are likely to be characterized by increasing returns to scale, an insight that has profound implications for economic growth. The purpose of this chapter...

This paper examines the potential impact of artificial intelligence (A.I.) on economic growth. We model A.I. as the latest form of automation, a broader process dating back more than 200 years. Electricity, internal combustion engines, and semiconductors facilitated automation in the last...

We analyze an economy where managers engage both in the adaptation of technologies from the world frontier and in innovation activities. The selection of high-skill managers is more important for innovation activities. As the economy approaches the technology frontier, selection becomes more...

This paper constructs a model of non-balanced economic growth. The main economic force is the combination of differences in factor proportions and capital deepening. Capital deepening tends to increase the relative output of the sector with a greater capital share, but simultaneously induces a...

In 1961, Nicholas Kaldor used his list of six "stylized" facts both to summarize the patterns that economists had discovered in national income accounts and to shape the growth models that they were developing to explain them. Redoing this exercise today, nearly fifty years later, shows how much...

This brief note revisits the proof of the Steady-State Growth Theorem, first provided by Uzawa (1961). We provide a clear statement of the theorem and a new version of Uzawa's proof that makes the intuition underlying the result more apparent

Transformative technologies like generative artificial intelligence promise to accelerate productivity growth across many sectors, but they also present new risks from potential misuse. We develop a multi-sector technology adoption model to study the optimal regulation of transformative...

This paper introduces endogenous and directed technical change in a growth model with environmental constraints and limited resources. A unique final good is produced by combining inputs from two sectors. One of these sectors uses "dirty" machines and thus creates environmental degradation....