A unified growth theory is developed that accounts for the roughly constant living standards displayed by world economies prior to 1800 as well as the growing living standards exhibited by modern industrial economies. Our theory also explains the industrial revolution, which is the transition...

Why doesn't capital flow into fast-growing countries? In this paper, we provide a quantitative framework incorporating heterogeneous producers and underdeveloped domestic financial markets to study the joint dynamics of total factor productivity (TFP) and capital flows. When an unexpected...

This paper studies structural transformation of Soviet Russia in 1928-1940 from an agrarian to an industrial economy through the lens of a two-sector neoclassical growth model. We construct a large dataset that covers Soviet Russia during 1928-1940 and Tsarist Russia during 1885-1913. We use a...

We build a model of firm-level innovation, productivity growth and reallocation featuring endogenous entry and exit. A new and central economic force is the selection between high- and low-type firms, which differ in terms of their innovative capacity. We estimate the parameters of the model...

The endogenous growth literature has explored the transition from a Malthusian world where real wages, living standards and labor productivity are all linked to factor endowments, to one where (endogenous) productivity change embedded in modern industrial growth breaks that link. Recently,...

Technological diffusion implies a form of 'conditional convergence' as lagging countries catch up with technological leaders. We find strong evidence of technological diffusion but not full convergence; differences in total factor productivity (TFP) persist even in the long run due to differences...

The problems involved in estimating real output that I discuss in this paper cause the official government statistics to underestimate of the rates of growth of real GDP, real personal income, and productivity. That underestimation is important not just to economists trying to understand where...

This paper decomposes Botswana's growth from the late 1960s through 2010 into a within-sector and a between-sector (structural change) component. We find that during the 70s and 80s Botswana's rapid economic growth was characterized by significant structural change with the share of the labor...

We develop a micro-founded general equilibrium model with heterogeneous agents and three dimensions of financial inclusion: access (determined by a participation cost), depth (determined by a borrowing constraint), and intermediation efficiency (determined by a monitoring cost). We find that the...