How can agricultural inheritance traditions affect structural change and economic development in rural areas? The most prominent historical traditions are primogeniture, where the oldest son inherits the whole farm, and equal partition, where land is split and each heir inherits an equal share....

How can agricultural inheritance traditions affect structural change and economic development in rural areas? The most prominent historical traditions are primogeniture, where the oldest son inherits the whole farm, and equal partition, where land is split and each heir inherits an equal share....

Obtaining reliable data on capital is a recurring challenge when estimating economy-wide productivity growth, especially for developing countries. In this paper I construct energy-based productivity series which use energy consumption instead of capital when making such estimates. I first show...

From an engineering perspective, a capital good’s service is energy conversion - e.g., the physical 'work' done by a machine - and can thus be measured directly by the energy consumed in production. We show important empirical advantages of our concept over traditional measures. The empirical...

This paper discusses several strategies for the maintenance of light standards, where each light standard consists of n independent and identical lamps screwed on a chandelier. The lamps are subject to stochastic failures, and must be correctively replaced if the number of failed lamps reaches a...