This paper analyzes the role of specialized high-skilled labor in the growth of the service sector as a share of the total economy. Empirically, we emphasize that the growth has been driven by the consumption of services. Rather than being driven by low-skill jobs, the importance of...

The remarkable decline in macroeconomic volatility experienced by the U.S. economy since the mid-80s (the so-called Great Moderation) has been accompanied by large changes in the patterns of comovements among output, hours and labor productivity. Those changes are reflected in both conditional...

Most industries go through a quot;shakeoutquot; phase during which the number of producers in the industry declines. Industry output generally continues to rise, however, which implies a reallocation of capacity from exiting firms to incumbents and new entrants. Thus shakeouts seem to be classic...

After more than three decades of high growth that was based on an exploration of its low-wage advantage and a relatively favorable demographic pattern in combination with market-oriented reforms and openness to the world economy, China is at a crossroad with a much higher wage and a shrinking...

Developing countries made considerable gains during the first decade of the 21st century. Their economies grew at unprecedented rates, resulting in large reductions in extreme poverty and a significant expansion of the middle class. But more recently that progress has slowed with an economic...

This paper examines the role of agricultural diversity in the process of development. Using data from U.S. counties and exploiting climate-induced variation in agricultural production patterns, I show that mid-19th century agricultural diversity had positive long-run effects on population...

Growth has accelerated in a wide range of developing countries over the last couple of decades, resulting in an extraordinary period of convergence with the advanced economies. We analyze this experience from the lens of structural change – the reallocation of labor from low- to...

This paper decomposes Botswana's growth from the late 1960s through 2010 into a within-sector and a between-sector (structural change) component. We find that during the 70s and 80s Botswana's rapid economic growth was characterized by significant structural change with the share of the labor...

This paper studies growth and structural transformation of the Chinese economy from 1953 to 2012 through a lens of a two-sector growth model. The main goal of the paper is to provide a systematic analysis of both the pre-1978 reform and post-1978 reform periods in a unified framework. First, we...

We find disparate trend variation in TFP and labor growth across major U.S. production sectors over the post-WWII period. When aggregated, these sector-specific trends imply secular declines in the growth rate of aggregate labor and TFP. We embed this sectoral trend variation into a dynamic...