This paper describes an emerging literature in economics that aims to merge macro issues of structural change and growth with micro data and analysis. This literature focuses on a set of related patterns of change that accompany the processes of growth and development. Traditionally, the focus...

What drives change in a society's values? From Marx to modernization theory, scholars have identified a connection between structural transformation and social change. To understand how changes in a society's dominant mode of production affect its dominant values, we examine the case of the...

Economies routinely experience a variety of sector-specific supply and demand shifts. Yet, the distributional welfare consequences of these shifts are not well understood. We address this gap by developing an analytical framework that jointly integrates supply-side and demand-side heterogeneity...

Are the U.S. textile and apparel industries examples of creative destruction or are they just plain destructing? We investigate this question using both aggregate industry-level data and plant-level data from the U.S. Census' LRD. We find that while the aggregate-level evidence is consistent...

In the early 1990s Israel experienced a large and concentrated surge of immigration from the former Soviet Union. Most Russian immigrants had high education levels relative to the average Israeli. Despite the size and skill mix of the immigration shock, existing research has found little...

This paper examines how inward and outward foreign direct investment (FDI) have influenced the restructuring of the Japanese economy and can be expected to continue to do so in the future. We find that outward investment has helped Japanese firms to sustain foreign market shares and contributed...

The observation that liquidations are concentrated in recessions has long been the subject of controversy. One view holds that liquidations are beneficial in that they result in increased restructuring. Another view holds that liquidations are privately inefficient and essentially wasteful. This...

In this paper, we examine the correlation between sectoral shocks and border enforcement in the United States. Enforcement of national borders is the main policy instrument the U.S. government uses to combat illegal immigration. The motivation for the exercise is to see whether border...

This paper provides evidence on the unit root hypothesis and long-term growth by allowing for two structural breaks. We reject the unit root hypothesis for three-quarters of the countries approximately 50% more rejections than in models that allow for only one break. While about half of the...

One of the most striking regularities of the growth process is the massive reallocation of labor from agriculture into industry and services. Balanced growth models are commonly used in macroeconomics because they are consistent with the well-known Kaldor facts about economic growth. These...