Digital versions of labor and capital can be reproduced much more cheaply than their traditional forms. This increases the supply and reduces the marginal cost of both labor and capital. What then, if anything, is becoming scarcer? We posit a third factor, ‘genius', that cannot be duplicated...

This study examines the patterns and causes of shortages in generic non-injectable drugs (e.g., tablets and topicals) in the United States. While shortages for injectable drugs have garnered more attention, shortages of other forms of prescription drugs have also been on the increase. In fact,...

Firms in the same industry can differ in measured productivity by multiples of 3. Griliches (1957) suggests one explanation: the quality of inputs differs across firms. We add labor market history variables such as experience and firm and industry tenure, as well as general human capital...

This paper re-explores the relation between a country's level of wealth and the mix of products it exports. We argue that both are simultaneously determined by countries' capabilities i.e. by countries' productivity and quality levels for each good. Our theoretical setup has two features. (1)...

We estimate productivities at the sector level for 72 countries and 5 decades, and examine how they evolve over time in both developed and developing countries. In both country groups, comparative advantage has become weaker: productivity grew systematically faster in sectors that were initially...

How does a country's productivity growth a¤ect worldwide real incomes through international trade? In this paper, we take this classic question to the data by measuring the spillover e¤ects of China's productivity growth. Our framework features traditional terms-of-trade e¤ects and new trade...

The most sweeping federal education law in decades, the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act, requires states to administer standardized exams and to punish schools that do not make Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP) for the fraction of students passing these exams. While the literature on school...

One of the most important developments in the growth literature of the last decade is the enhanced appreciation of the role that the misallocation of resources plays in helping us understand income differences across countries. Misallocation at the micro level typically reduces total factor...

The new trade theory emphasizes the role of market-share reallocations across firms ("stealing") in driving productivity growth, while the older literature focused on average productivity improvements ("learning"). We use comprehensive, firm-level data from India's organized manufacturing sector...

We build up from the plant level an "aggregate(d)" Solow residual by estimating every U.S. manufacturing plant's contribution to the change in aggregate final demand between 1976 and 1996. Our framework uses the Petrin and Levinsohn (2010) definition of aggregate productivity growth, which...