Output per worker is lower in poor countries than in rich countries, and relatively more so in the agricultural sector. Sorting of heterogeneous workers can contribute to explain this fact if comparative and absolute advantage are aligned in agriculture, implying that average productivity in...

This research argues that variations in the interplay between cultural assimilation and cultural diffusion have played a significant role in giving rise to differential patterns of economic development across the globe. Societies that were geographically less vulnerable to cultural diffusion...

Korea imports all of its primary energy, which leads to high dependency and vulnerability related to its energy supply. Efficiency in the use of energy is a way to reduce dependency and emissions. This study provides empirical results of the stochastic production process in energy use. Special...

We model the aid allocation decision where the donor government has announced that good governance is the criterion for receiving aid. Potential recipients must compete for the aid funds. The structure of the competition is important to the donor in terms of achieving good governance, and to the...

This paper provides a unified theory of the economic and demographic transition. Individualsmake optimal decisions about fertility, education of their children and the type and intensity ofthe investments in their own education. These decisions are affected by different dimensionsof mortality...

This paper considers the implications of the permanent/transitory decomposition of shocksfor identification of structural models in the general case where the model might contain morethan one permanent structural shock. It provides a simple and intuitive generalization of theinfluential work of...

We propose a unified growth theory to investigate the mechanics generating the economic and demographic transition, and the role of mortality differences for comparative development. The framework can replicate the quantitative patterns in historical time series data and in contemporaneous...

The aggregate Frisch elasticity of labor supply has played a key role in business cycle analysis. This paper develops a statistical aggregation procedure which allows for worker heterogeneity in observables and unobservables and is applicable to an individual labor supply function with...

In the tradition of Afriat (1967), Diewert (1973) and Varian (1982), we provide a revealed preference characterisation of the representative consumer. Our results are simple and complement those of Gorman (1953, 1961), Samuelson (1956) and others. They can also be applied to data very readily...