This paper reviews some reasons why natural resource abundance and extensive agriculture appear to impede economic growth around the world. The paper presents empirical, cross-sectional evidence of various aspects of this relationship in the transition economies in Central and Eastern Europe and...

Voigtländer and Voth argue that the Black Death shifted England towards pastoral agriculture, increasing wages for unmarried women, thereby delaying female marriage, lowering fertility, and unleashing economic growth. We show that this argument does not hold. Its crucial assumption is...

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...

We examine the comovements between the output indexes of three German sectors (manufacturing, mining, and agriculture) and the three corresponding sectoral stock market indexes. It is found that data with and without seasonal adjustment give mixed results on the long-run interaction between the...

In poor countries, labor productivity in agriculture is considerably lower than in the rest of the economy. We assess whether this well known fact implies that labor is mis-allocated between the two sectors. We make several observations that suggest otherwise. First, the same fact holds for US...