Consider the following facts. In 1950, the richest countries attained an average of 8 years of schooling whereas the poorest countries 1.3 years, a large 6-fold difference. By 2005, the difference in schooling declined to 2-fold because schooling increased faster in poor than in rich countries....

How important was international immigration for the U.S. and its demography during the nineteenth century? This paper investigates, quantitatively, its effect on the westward movement of population and the regional and secular changes in fertility. Beside immigration, two alternative forces are...

We formulate a version of the growth model in which production is carried out by heterogeneous establishments and calibrate it to U.S. data. In the context of this model we argue that differences in the allocation of resources across establishments that differ in productivity may be an important...

There are substantial differences in business cycle fluctuations across countries. These differences are systematically related to the share of agriculture in the economy: Countries with a high share of employment in agriculture feature high fluctuations in aggregate output, low relative...

A striking observation of the U.S. and other labor markets is the weak position of women in terms of job attachment, employment, and earnings relative to men. We develop a model of fertility and labor market decisions to study the impact of fertility on gender differences in labor turnover,...

A large portion of differences in output per capita across countries is explained by differences in total factor productivity (TFP). In this article, we summarize a recent literature — and the articles in this special issue on misallocation and productivity — that focus on the...

Despite mandatory parental leave policies being a prevalent feature of labor markets in developed countries, their aggregate effects in the economy are not well understood. To assess their quantitative impact, we develop a general equilibrium model of fertility and labor market decisions that...