We modify the concept of the middle-income trap (MIT) against the background of the Fourth Industrial Revolution and the (future) challenges of automation (creating the concept of the "MIT 2.0") and discuss the implications for developing Asia. In particular, we analyze the impacts of...

This paper offers the first systematic historical evidence on the role of a central actor in modern growth theory - the engineer. It collects cross-country and state level data on the labor share of engineers for the Americas, and county level data on engineering and patenting for the US during...

Existing studies identify two major underlying mechanisms behind East and Southeast Asia’s miraculous economic performance in the past 5 decades: accumulation and technological catching-up. This study investigates empirically the relative importance of these two mechanisms in Asian development...

This paper examines how the accumulation of human capital determines both a country's growth rate and income inequality. In contrast to previous work, we do not rely on credit market imperfections or political economy arguments. The insight of this model is that inequality is determined by the...

To examine how human capital accumulation influences both economic growth and income inequality, we carefully endogenize the demand and supply of skills. We explicitly introduce the costs and externalities in education, and examine how both relate to learning-by-doing and R&D intensity.1 In...