We study the capacity to meet food demand under conditions of climate change, economic and population growth. We take a novel approach to quantifying climate impacts, based on a model of the global economy structurally estimated on the period 1960 to 2015. The model integrates several features...

This paper studies a model of the distribution of income under bounded needs. Utility derived from any given good reaches a bliss point at a finite consumption level of that good. On the other hand, introducing new varieties always increases utility. It is assumed that each variety is owned by a...

We study the role of endogenous healthcare choices by households to extend their expected lifetimes on economic growth and welfare in a decentralized overlapping generations economy with the realistic feature that households' savings are held in annuities. We characterize healthcare spending in...

The research explores the effect of industrialization on human capital formation. Exploiting exogenous regional variations in the adoption of steam engines across France, the study establishes that in contrast to conventional wisdom that views early industrialization as a predominantly...

Although many U.S. state policies presume that human capital is important for state economic development, there is little research linking better education to state incomes. In a complement to international studies of income differences, we investigate the extent to which quality-adjusted...

Between 1997 and 2014, US corn, soybean and cotton production almost fully converted to genetically modified crops. Starting around 2007, improved tight oil and shale gas technologies turned the declining US fossil fuel production into a booming industry. We study the effects of these two...

Does the concept of General Purpose Technologies help explain periods of faster and slower productivity advance in economies? The paper develops a new comparative data set on the usage of electricity in the manufacturing sectors of the USA, Britain, France, Germany and Japan and proceeds to...

We investigate the long-term macroeconomic effects of climate change across 48 U.S. states over the period 1963.2016 using a novel econometric strategy which links deviations of temperature and precipitation (weather) from their long-term moving-average historical norms (climate) to various...

This paper studies structural change in production networks for intermediate inputs (input-output network) and new capital (investment network). For each network, we document a declining fraction of production by goods sectors and a rising fraction of production by services sectors. We develop a...