Everyone has to eat, so those who produce food must produce enough to feed themselves and to feed all those who do not produce their own food. Once stated. this is trivially obvious but, I will argue, making that simple relation between agriculture and the rest of the economy explicit and, at...

The purpose of this paper is to examine Smith's four stages theory of history as an account of economic and social development, with an emphasis on the arguments and evidence he used to support it. In his biographical account of Smith's life, his friend Dugald Stewart described Smith’s method...

Schumpeter argued, long ago, that Quesnay's tableau economique was based on Cantillon, but this claim has never been spelled out in detail and seems not to have been generally accepted, since many writers still write of the tableau economique as though it were Quesnay's alone. This paper...

We consider testing for weak instruments in a model with multiple endogenous variables. Unlike Stock and Yogo (2005), who considered a weak instruments problem where the rank of the matrix of reduced form parameters is near zero, here we consider a weak instruments problem of a near rank...

We provide a joint account of the unemployment and labor force participation patterns of older male workers during the past half-century, and of the role of institutions that have shaped their employment experience. To do so, we build an equilibrium model with labor market frictions,...

This paper provides new empirical insights on the joint distribution of consumption, income, and wealth (CIW) in three of the poorest countries in the world - Malawi, Tanzania, and Uganda - all located in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA). Our first finding is that while income inequality is similar to...

This paper studies the secular behavior of worker reallocation across occupations in the US labor market. In the empirical analysis, we use 45 years of microdata to construct consistent time-series and document that the fraction of employment reallocated annually across occupations is remarkably...

The issue of model uncertainty is central to the empirical study of economic growth. Many recent papers use Bayesian Model Averaging to address model uncertainty, but Ciccone and Jarociński (2010) have questioned the approach on theoretical and empirical grounds. They argue that a standard...

This paper proposes a small-scale general equilibrium model of structural transformation with an urban labour market characterized by search frictions. The model is used to investigate the role of sectoral TFPs as main drivers of structural change and a new growth accounting exercise gives a...

Focus - specialization and specific technology - improves productivity but leads to more dependency and opens a door for power problems. We analyze how organizational design and the choice of technology interact with the allocation of ownership in minimizing the holdup problem in the property...