What obstacles prevent the most productive technologies from spreading to less developed economies from the world … distances between populations, and document how such distances, relative to the world's technological frontier, act as barriers …

We estimate an empirical model of consumption disasters using a new panel data set on personal consumer expenditure for … consumption of about 30%, but that roughly half of this decline is reversed in a subsequent recovery. Uncertainty about … consumption growth increases dramatically during disasters. Our estimated model generates a sizable equity premium from disaster …

relative consumption growth and real exchange-rate depreciation across countries. The striking lack of evidence for this link … the consumption/real-exchange-rate anomaly or Backus-Smith puzzle - has prompted research on risk-sharing indicators with …. Independent evidence on the weak link between forecasts for consumption and real interest rates suggests that the presence of …

the world averages more than 6% per year since 1960 as opposed to 2% per year for consumption growth. Countries such as … people as well as their standard of living. We decompose social welfare growth -- measured in consumption-equivalent (CE …) units -- into contributions from rising population and rising per capita consumption. Because of diminishing marginal …

United States and the World. Furthermore, shares of income paid to labor and capital (properly measured) have also decreased …

affect the steepness of the lifetime consumption profile. As a consequence, the occupational choice of entrepreneurship …