We study the demand for government participation in China's venture capital and private equity market. We conduct a large-scale, non-deceptive field experiment in collaboration with the leading industry service provider, through which we survey both sides of the market: the capital investors and...

Two centuries ago, in most countries around the world, women were unable to vote, had no say over their own children or property, and could not obtain a divorce. Women have gradually gained rights in many areas of life, and this legal expansion has been closely intertwined with economic...

This paper examines the extent to which changes in working-age shares associated with population aging might slow economic growth in upcoming years. We first analyze the economic effects of changing working-age shares in a standard empirical growth model using country panel data from 1950-2015....

We augment Henderson, Storeygard, and Weil (2012)'s two-signal model of true income growth with a third signal to overcome its underidentification problem. The additional moment conditions from the third signal help fully identify all model parameters without ad-hoc calibrations of the GDP's...

Economic growth is typically measured in per capita terms. But social welfare should arguably include the number of people as well as their standard of living. We decompose social welfare growth -- measured in consumption-equivalent (CE) units -- into contributions from rising population and...

How far is the world away from ensuring that every child obtains the basic skills needed to be internationally competitive? And what would accomplishing this mean for world development? Based on the micro data of international and regional achievement tests, we map achievement onto a common...

We document the role of intangible capital in manufacturing firms' substantial contribution to non-manufacturing employment growth from 1977-2019. Exploiting data on firms' "auxiliary" establishments, we develop a novel measure of proprietary in-house knowledge and show that it is associated...

We document a process of rapid tertiarization of the Chinese economy since 2005. The employment and value-added shares of the service sector have increased significantly. Moreover, total factor productivity growth has increased faster in the service sector than in the manufacturing sector....

This paper studies China's four-fold increase in per capita GDP relative to the U.S. between 1995 and 2019. First, we argue that China's growth pattern is very similar to that of several other East Asia economies that initially grew very quickly. Second, we show that a minimalist...

Compared to a half-century ago, inequality in the United states has risen and measured productivity growth has fallen. Concerns about rising inequality have been exacerbated by the observation that prices of goods consumed by the poor have risen faster than prices of goods consumed by the rich....