Economies at early stages of development are often shaken by abrupt changes in growth rates, whereas in advanced economies growth rates tend to be relatively stable. To explain this pattern, we propose a theory of technological diversification. Production makes use of different input varieties,...

Studies of firm-level data have shown that there is a huge dispersion of productivity across firms even when industries are narrowly defined. So there is a significant opportunity for the least productive firms to catch up to the most productive. The formers’ convergence could therefore...

A startling fact of firm level productivity analysis is the large and persistent differences in both labour productivity and total factor productivity (TFP) between firms in narrowly defined sectoral classes. The competitiveness of an industry is potentially an important factor explaining this...

Much of recent Trade theory focuses on heterogeneity of firms and the differential impacttrade policy might have on firms with different levels of productivity. A common problem isthat most firm level dataset do not contain information on output prices of firms which makesit difficult to...

Per capita incomes across European regions are not equal and do not stay constant; regional income distributions uctuate over time. Such a process could have many possible limiting outcomes: complete equal- ity (convergence), stratication, and continually increasing inequality are but three...

Many cultural products have the same nonrival nature as scientific knowledge. They therefore face identical difficulties in creation and dissemination. One traditional view says market failure is endemic: societies tolerate monopolistic inefficiency in intellectual property (IP) protection to...

Theoretical models of growth and trade suggest that patterns of international specialization are dynamic and evolve endogenously over time. Initial comparative advantages are either reinforced or gradually unwound with the passage of time. This paper puts forward an empirical framework for...

This paper presents a single unified framework that integrates the theoretical literature on Schumpeterian endogenous growth and major strands of the empirical literatures on R&D, productivity growth, and productivity convergence. Starting from a structural model of endogenous growth following...

This paper studies cross-country patterns of economic growth from the viewpoint of income distribution dynamics. Such a perspective raises new empirical and theoretical issues in growth analysis: the profound empirical regularity is an \emerging twin peaks" in the cross-sectional distribution,...

How much would output increase if underdeveloped economies were to increase their levels of schooling? We contribute to the development accounting literature by describing a nonparametric upper bound on the increase in output that can be generated by more schooling. The advantage of our approach...