This paper presents a comparative analysis of productivity growth in the U.S. and Japanese electrical machinery industries in the postwar period. This industry has experienced rapid growth in output and productivity and high rates of capital formation in both countries. A substantial amount of...

The paper considers issues in recent research on macroeconomic equilibrium in centrally planned economies. I defend the explicit aggregative , macroeconomic approach in theory, institutional relationships and measurement. It has offered a fresh, coherent framework for analysis of many CPE...

This empirical study stresses the underlying macroeconomic forces which determine foreign trade flows in CPEs. The general specification includes a planners' demand equation for the volume of imports, a planners' supply equation for the volume of exports, and a rest-of-world demand equation for...

Technological advances and genomic sequencing opened the road to personalized medicine: specialized therapies targeted to patients displaying specific molecular alterations. For instance, targeted therapies are now available for 50% of lung cancer patients--with some alterations affecting less...

We develop and estimate a new model of endogenous growth in bank efficiency and firm productivity in which banks adopt technology embedded in capital goods produced by entrepreneurs, and agents choose whether to become workers or capital-good-producing entrepreneurs. In this framework, bank...

For most of human history, until the fertility transition, technological progress translated into larger populations, preventing sustained improvements in living standards. We argue that migration offered an escape valve from these Malthusian dynamics after the European discovery and...

During the Covid-19 pandemic, the United States effectively "spent" about 4 percent of GDP -- via reduced economic activity -- to address a mortality risk of roughly 0.3 percent. Many experts believe that catastrophic risks from advanced A.I. over the next decade are at least this large,...

Using newly-collected data on the near-population of U.S. STEM PhD graduates since 1950, we examine who funds PhD training, how many graduates are trained in areas of strategic national importance, and the effects of public investment in PhD training on the scientific workforce. The U.S. federal...

This paper studies how innovation reacts to foreign political risk and shapes its economic consequences. In a model with foreign political shocks that can disrupt the supply of foreign inputs, we show that greater political risk abroad increases domestic innovation, thereby lowering reliance on...

Cars have gotten bigger and faster yet more fuel efficient in recent decades. Why? We estimate an equilibrium model of car attribute production using U.S. household microdata for 1995-2017 and structurally decompose attribute trends into underlying mechanisms. We find that technical change led...