The U.S. went through a remarkable structural transformation between 1800 and 2000. In 1800 the majority of people worked in agriculture. Barely anyone did by 2000. What caused the rapid demise of agriculture in the economy? The analysis here concentrates on the development of new consumer goods...

What determines the direction of technological progress is one of the central questions that economics needs to answer. By introducing a small but fundamental generalization of Acemolgu (2002) the current paper points out the key determinants of that direction. The extended model argues that...

We prove a generalized, multi-factor version of the Uzawa steady-state growth theorem. The theorem implies that neoclassical growth models need at least three factors of production to be consistent with empirical evidence on both the capital-labor elasticity of substitution and the existence of...

The first objective of this chapter is to present a new approach to econometric modeling of producer behavior. Our key contribution is to represent the rate and biases of technical change by unobservable or latent variables. We also divide the rate of technical change between components that are...

We present a tractable model for analyzing the relationship between economic growth and the intensive and extensive margins of technology adoption. The “extensive" margin refers to the timing of a country's adoption of a new technology; the “intensive" margin refers to how many units are...

In the aftermath of World War II, the world's economies exhibited very different rates of economic recovery. We provide evidence that those countries that caught up the most with the U.S. in the postwar period are those that also saw an acceleration in the speed of adoption of new technologies....

The sectoral composition of the US economy has changed dramatically in the past six decades. At the same time, knowledge and information assets are becoming increasingly important in the value creation process of a modern economy. This paper aims to explain the recent sectoral structural change...

This paper argues that investment-specific technological progress (ISTP) conventionally identified with the relative price of investment, inevitably correlate with neutral technological progress in heterogeneous production networks. Consequently, the ISTP is an elusive concept to examine the...

We use the two-sector specific factors model, which is known from the theory of international trade, in a growth context to describe major trends of long-run economic development. The endogenous technical progress functions establish the link between the agricultural and the manufacturing sector...

Based on a general growth model, this paper finds that the steady-state direction of technological progress is determined by the scale return of the production function and the relative factor supply elasticities. A specific version of that model extends Acemoglu (2002) to provide the underlying...