It is well known that poor countries are much less productive in agriculture than in the rest of the economy, and that it is hard to account for these productivity gaps. In this paper, we study US states during 1980–2009. We find that there are large productivity gaps between agriculture...

It is well known that hours per working-age person in continental Europe have shown a rather different time series pattern than in the US. While in 1970, hours per working-age person were similar, they subsequently fell in continental Europe but did not show a clear trend in the US. Strikingly,...

We document for nine countries ranging from rich (Canada, U.S.) to poor (India, Indonesia) that average wages are higher in non–agriculture than in agriculture. We measure sectoral human capital and find that it accounts for the entire wage gap in the U.S. and most of the wage gaps...

that the answer is yes.

The most important result of our analysis is we that find significant departures from the sets of conditions that the previous literature has identified as capturing the key forces behind balanced growth. In particular, we find evidence that factor shares are not common across sectors and that...

We illustrate the usefulness of our approach by applying it to the so called Balassa-Samuelson effect, that is, in a cross sectional sense, countries with higher ppp adjusted incomes tend to have higher aggregate price levels (in a common numeraire). We show that as the US economy develops, its...

We demonstrate the usefulness of our results by using them to shed light on the existing empirical evidence. In particular, we argue that the studies of Syverson (2004), Schmitz (2005), and Lagakos (2007) are examples of how differences in the market size affect productivity. Our results are...

A big question in development economics is why developing countries are so unproductive in agriculture. This question is hard to answer because of limited data. In this project, we explore what we can learn from agriculture in US states where we have rich data. Focusing on US states has the...

This paper assesses how structural transformation is affected by sectoral differences in labor-augmenting technological progress, capital intensity, and substitutability between capital and labor. We estimate CES production functions for agriculture, manufacturing, and services on postwar US...

Most real-world trade liberalizations decrease tariffs and increase quotas without completely abolishing them. We ask how decreases in tariffs and increases in quotas affect productivity in an economy with monopoly rights in the import-competing sector. We show that a reduction in a tariff can...