Industrialized countries have long seen relatively stable growth in output per capita and a stable labor share. AI may be transformative, in the sense that it may break one or both of these stylized facts. This review outlines the ways this may happen by placing several strands of the literature...

While substantial empirical research has evaluated the question of whether capital account openness promotes economic growth, this paper finds empirical evidence for cases where the opposite is true--that a policy of capital controls can promote economic growth, when combined with a policy of...

Innovation depends on exporting and, in particular, on scale and competition in export markets. We develop a theory featuring (1) quality-segmented markets, (2) step-by-step innovation that moves firms forward along the quality ladder, and (3) escape-the-competition motives for innovation. We...

This paper evaluates claims about large macroeconomic implications of new advances in AI. It starts from a task-based model of AI's effects, working through automation and task complementarities. So long as AI's microeconomic effects are driven by cost savings/productivity improvements at the...

Growth theory is based on the assumption of exponential total factor productivity (TFP) growth. Across countries and time periods I find that TFP growth is actually linear. Unlike the exponential model, the additive growth model provides useful medium-term forecasts of TFP. It also explains the...

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...

Income disparity across countries has been large and widening over time. We develop a tractable model where factor requirements in production technology do not necessarily match a country's factor input profile. Appropriate assimilation of frontier technologies balances such multi-dimensional...

We construct a model of firm dynamics with heterogeneous productivity and distortions. The productivity distribution evolves endogenously as the result of the decisions of firms seeking to upgrade their productivity over time. Firms can adopt two strategies toward that end: imitation and...

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...

This paper reviews the evolving literature that links financial development, financial crises, and economic growth in the past 20 years. The initial disconnect--with one literature focusing on the effect of financial deepening on long-run growth and another studying its impact on volatility and...