Recent research has documented a U-shaped industrial concentration curve over an economy's development path. How far can neoclassical trade theory take us in explaining this pattern? We estimate the production side of the Heckscher-Ohlin model using industry data on 44 developed and developing...

There is a growing interest in multi-sector models that combine aggregate balanced growth, consistent with the well-known Kaldor facts, with systematic changes in the sectoral allocation of resources, consistent with the Kuznets facts. Although variations in the income elasticity of demand...

This paper aims to provide a critical overview of the drivers that the relevant theoretical and empirical literature suggests being crucial in dealing with the challenges an emerging country may encounter in its attempts to further catch-up a higher income status, with a particular focus devoted...

This paper is intended to provide an updated discussion on a series of issues that the relevant literature suggests to be crucial in dealing with the challenges a middle income country may encounter in its attempts to further catch-up a higher income status. In particular, the conventional...

We analyze how globalization has affected the sectoral anatomy of regional growth in Germany over the period 1978-2008. The aggregate German economy is characterized by a secular decline of manufacturing and a rise of modern service industries. This trend - also known as Petty's law - is not...

Industrial policies, such as infrastructure investments and export tariffs, affect the allocation of labor and incomes across sectors, attracting substantial lobbying efforts by special interest groups. Yet, the link between structural change and lobbying remains underexplored. Using more than...

Intangible knowledge capital (IKC) - technology produced by workers but not embodied in them - can offset the "middle income trap" as China exhausts the benefits of international technology transfer. IKC is productivity-enhancing among Chinese enterprises - more so in domestically owned than in...

How do economic policies and institutions affect job reallocation processes and their consequences for productivity growth? This paper studies the extreme case of economic system change and alternative transitional policies in the former Soviet Republics of Russia and Ukraine. Exploiting annual...

This paper examines the drivers of the long-run structural transformation in Japan. We use a dynamic input-output framework that decomposes the reallocation of the total output across sectors into two components: the Engel effect (demand side) and the Baumol effect (supply side). To perform this...

Does immigration accelerate sectoral change towards high-productivity sectors? This paper uses the mass displacement of ethnic Germans from Eastern Europe to West Germany after World War II as a natural experiment to study this question. A simple two-sector model of the economy, in which moving...