During the first half of the 20th century the length of the workweek in the U.S. declined, and its distribution across wage deciles narrowed. The hypothesis is twofold. First, technological progress, through the rise in wages and the decreasing cost of recreation, made it possible for the...

The structural transformation of China – or the reallocation of resources from the agricultural sector to the nonagricultural sector – between 1978 and 2003 was truly remarkable. We develop a two-sector neoclassical growth model to quantitatively assess the driving forces of China's recent...

Standard growth models require large differences in barriers to capital accumulation to reproduce the observed disparities in the wealth of nations. I introduce technology adoption and schooling decisions into a standard growth model and show that the required differences in barriers implied by...