What determines whether a country is better at using some technologies than others? A widely held view is that a country’s ability to absorb and implement technologies is tied to its human capital. In this paper, we construct a novel specification of technology that incorporates this idea....

Over the past decade, research explaining cross country income differences has increasingly pointed to the dominant role of total factor productivity (TFP) gaps as opposed to factor accumulation. Nevertheless, it is a widely held belief that a country’s ability to absorb and implement...

Over the past decade, research explaining cross country income differences has increasingly pointed to the dominant role of total factor productivity (TFP) gaps as opposed to factor accumulation. Nevertheless, it is a widely held belief that a country's ability to absorb and implement...

This paper analyzes the necessary local conditions required for the existence of positive spillovers from multinationals' entry and it consists of a unified study of absorptive capacities. We start from the idea that FDI speeds up the diffusion of technologies across countries. Yet, the question...

While many countries in the euro area are deep in recession due to a debt and structural crisis, the German economy appears to have excelled compared to many other euro area countries. Unemployment has fallen to the lowest level since German reunification, economic output has grown by over eight...

While many countries in the European Monetary Union are deep in recession due to a debt and structural crisis, the German economy appears to have excelled compared to many other euro area states. Unemployment has fallen to the lowest level since German reunification, economic output has grown by...

This paper explores the consequences of rising returns to human capital investment on the personal savings rate. Over the past two decades, the return to college education has increased relative to high school education leading economists to argue the presence of skill biased technological...

Despite being located within a well integrated economy such as the US, its states exhibit considerable heterogeneity, both in the composition of output and in sectoral labor productivity growth. In this paper, we examine the sources of uneven labor productivity growth across sectors in US...

We revisit the idea that colonized countries that were more (less) economically advanced in 1500 became poorer (richer, respectively) by the late 20th century. Using data on place of origin of today’s country populations and the urbanization and population density measures used by Acemoglu et...

In this paper, we compare the relative roles of multi-factor productivity (MFP) growth and factor accumulation in goods and services for states in the US from 1980 to 2007 using the dual growth accounting framework. We find that while MFP growth was relatively high, and converged in the goods...