This paper integrates daytime and nighttime satellite imagery into a spatial general-equilibrium model to evaluate the returns to investments in new motorways. Our approach has particular value in developing-country settings in which granular data on economic activity are scarce. To demonstrate...

This paper studies household inequality and product market power in dynamic, general equilibrium. In our model, households' price elasticities of demand endogenously vary with wealth. Heterogeneous firms set their price as oligopolistic competitors given the endogenous distribution of demand. A...

We document and dissect a new stylized fact about firm growth: the shift from labor to intermediate inputs. This shift occurs in input quantities, cost and output shares, and output elasticities. We establish this fact using German firm-level data and replicate it in administrative firm data...

We examine the dynamics of a country's growth, consumption, and sovereign debt, assuming that the government is myopic and wants to maximize short-term, self-interested spending. Surprisingly, government myopia can increase a country's access to external borrowing. In turn, access to borrowing...

This paper investigates the reversibility of the effects of transport infrastructure investments, based on a programme that removed much of the rail network in Britain during the mid-20th Century. We find that a 10% loss in rail access between 1950 and 1980 caused a persistent 3% decline in...

Developing countries employ a very large share of their workforce in agriculture, a sector in which their labor productivity is particularly low. We take a macroeconomic approach to analyze the role of agriculture in development. We construct a new database with systematic measures of inputs and...

We explore the economic effects of biodiversity loss by developing an ecologically-founded model that captures how different species interact to deliver the ecosystem services that complement other factors of economic production. Aggregate ecosystem services are produced by combining several...

Which region(s) will come to dominate the world economy? This paper develops the Global Gaidar Model (GGM), a 17-region, 2-skills, 100-period OLG model, to address this and other questions. The model is carefully calibrated to 2017 UN demographic and IMF fiscal data. Productivity growth and its...

Trade and industrial policies, while primarily intended to support domestic industries, may unintentionally stimulate technological progress abroad. We document this mechanism in the case of rare earth elements (REEs) - critical inputs for manufacturing at the knowledge frontier, with low...