This essay provides a review of two important recent books on economic growth: How the World Became Rich by Mark Koyama and Jared Rubin and Slouching Towards Utopia, by J. Bradford DeLong. Each book is noteworthy for its erudition and breadth. I explore strengths and weaknesses of these books...

This essay reviews the theory and empirics of intergenerational mobility. Our review draws on models and empirical analyses of classic and more recent work from both economics and sociology. We summarize models and the surrounding empirical evidence of two key sets of mechanisms: family factors...

This paper provides a synthesis of theoretical and empirical work on the Great Gatsby Curve, the positive empirical relationship between cross-section income inequality and persistence of income across generations. We present statistical models of income dynamics that mechanically give rise to...

This paper develops an approach to intergenerational mobility in which the trajectories of parental incomes during childhood and adolescence are the conditioning objects for characterizing dependence across generations. We use functional regression methods to produce an intergenerational...

Immigrants in economies with a dominant native language exhibit substantial heterogeneities in language acquisition of the majority language. We model partial equilibrium language acquisition as an equilibrium phenomenon. We consider an environment where heterogeneous agents from various...

This paper studies long-run differences in intergenerational occupational mobility between Black and White Americans. Combining data from linked historical censuses and contemporary large-scale surveys, we provide a comprehensive set of mobility measures based on Markov chains that trace the...

This paper explores the dynamics of income inequality by studying the evolution of human capital investment and neighborhood choice for a population of families. Parents affect the conditional probability distribution of their children's income through the choice of a neighborhood in which to...

This paper explores the role of complementarities and coordination failure in economic growth. We analyze the evolution composed of a countable set of infinitely-lived heterogenous industries. Individual industries exhibit nonconvexities in production and are linked across time through localized...

This paper studies an economy in which incomplete markets and strong complementarities interact to generate path dependent aggregate output fluctuations. An economy is said to be path dependent when the effect of a shock on the level of aggregate output is permanent in the absence of future...

This paper explores the impact of incomplete markets and strong complementarities on the time series properties of aggregate activity. We consider an economy which consists of a large number of industries whose production functions both are nonconvex and exhibit localized technological...