We examine the relationship between urban characteristics in 1960 and urban growth (income and population) between 1960 and 1990. Our major findings are that income and population growth move together and both types of growth are (1) positively related to initial schooling, (2) negatively...

Do natural resources benefit producer economies, or is there a "Natural Resource Curse,"0 perhaps as the crowd-out of manufacturing productivity spillovers reduces long-term growth? We combine new data on oil and gas endowments with Census of Manufactures microdata to estimate how oil and gas...

The U.S. dollar's nominal effective exchange rate closely tracks global financial conditions, which themselves show a cyclical pattern. Over that cycle, world asset prices, leverage, and capital flows move in concert with global growth, especially influencing the fortunes of emerging and...

Are labor markets in higher-income countries more meritocratic, in the sense that worker-job matching is based on skills rather than idiosyncratic attributes unrelated to productivity? If so, why? And what are the aggregate consequences? Using internationally comparable data on worker skills and...

We examine aggregate productivity differences across nations using cross-country firm-level data and a quantitative model of production heterogeneity with distortions featuring operation decisions (selection) and productivity-enhancing investments (technology). Empirically, less developed...

We show how to use optimal control theory to derive optimal time-consistent Markov-perfect government policies in nonlinear dynamic general equilibrium models, extending the result of Cohen and Michel (1988) for models with quadratic objective functions and linear dynamics. We replace private...

This paper contributes to the debate on fiscal multipliers, in the context of a structural model. I estimate a micro-founded dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model, that features a rich fiscal policy block and a transmission mechanism for government spending shocks, using Bayesian...

This paper studies an economy where agents can spend resources on consuming a private good and on funding a public good. There is asymmetric information regarding agents' relative preference for private versus public good consumption. I show how private good consumption should be coordinated...

We build an otherwise-standard business cycle model with housework, calibrated consistently with data on time use, in order to discipline consumption-hours complementarity and relate its strength to the size of fiscal multipliers. We show that if substitutability between home and market goods is...

In this paper, we investigate the effects of housing-related tax policy measures on macroeconomic aggregates using a dynamic general-equilibrium model. The model features borrowing and lending across heterogeneous households, financial frictions in the form of collateral constraints tied to...