The prevalence of untitled land in poor countries helps explain the agricultural productivity gap between rich and poor countries. Since untitled land cannot be rented or traded across farmers, it creates not only land market misallocation, but also distortions in occupational choice. I build a...

There are striking differences in the size distribution of farms between rich and poor countries. We study the determinants of farm-size across countries and their impact on agricultural and aggregate productivity by developing a quantitative model of agriculture and non-agriculture that...

There is a 34-fold difference in average farm size (land per farm) between rich and poor countries and striking differences in their size distributions. Since labor productivity is much higher in large relative to small farms, we study the determinants of farm-size differences across countries...

We develop an endogenous growth model in which new technology and new skills are bounded complements they complement each other up to a point, but beyond this the impact of each factor is constrained by the level of the other. As a result, both technological progress and human capital...

This paper examines the impact of education and occupational choice on the growth-inequality relationship. Occupations that play asymmetric roles in the production process are distinguished. The dynamic evolution of the detrended distribution of income is characterized and shown to converge to...

The relative price of services rises with development. A standard interpretation of this fact is that cross-country productivity differences are larger in manufacturing than in services. The service sector comprises heterogeneous categories. We document that the behavior of relative prices is...

There are striking differences in the size distribution of farms between rich and poor countries. We study the determinants of farm-size across countries and their impact on agricultural and aggregate productivity by developing a quantitative model of agriculture and non-agriculture that...

We construct and analyze a tractable search model of money with a non-degenerate distribution of money holdings. Analytical tractability comes from modeling decentralized exchange as directed search, which makes the monetary steady state block recursive. By adapting lattice-theoretic techniques,...

A recurrent and indeed persistent problem in European economic history – a veritable deus ex machina -- from medieval to modern times, is Europe’s supposed ‘balance of payments’ problem in trade with the ‘East’. This supposed problem has often been couched in Mercantilist overtones:...

This paper reexamines the uncovered interest parity condition within the context of a structural view of real exchange rate determination that emphasizes the real exchange rate as the relative price of domestic in terms of foreign output. This structural interpretation complements rather than...