India's Industrial Disputes Act (IDA) of 1947 requires firm with more than 100 workers to pay large costs if they shrink their employment. Since the early 2000s, large Indian manufacturing firms have increasingly relied on contract workers who are not subject to the IDA. By 2015, contract...

Reducing global poverty and addressing climate change and other environmental crises are among the most important challenges facing humanity today. This review article discusses one way in which these problems are intertwined: economic development affects the environment. I synthesize recent...

The path of income inequality in post-reform China has been widely interpreted as "China's Kuznets curve." We show that the Kuznets growth model of structural transformation in a dual economy, alongside population urbanization, has little explanatory power for our new series of inequality...

Kremer, Willis, and You (2021) revisit cross-country convergence patterns over the last six decades. They provide evidence that the lack of convergence that applied early in the sample has now been replaced by modest convergence. They also argue this relationship is driven by convergence in...

This essay discusses the reasons for and implications of the decline in real interest rates around the world over the past several decades. It suggests that the decline in interest rates is largely explicable from trends in saving, growth, and markups. In this environment, greater government...

Chapter 6 from the forthcoming Inclusive Wealth Report 2022 looks at human capital in greater detail, based on the latest human capital estimates from the Inclusive Wealth Report (IWR) project. In the chapter, which is repeated here, the growth of human capital and several of its constituent...

Growth theory is based on the assumption of exponential total factor productivity (TFP) growth. Across countries and time periods I find that TFP growth is actually linear. Unlike the exponential model, the additive growth model provides useful medium-term forecasts of TFP. It also explains the...

Intro -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction / Ajay Agrawal, Joshua Gans, and Avi Goldfarb -- I. AI as a GPT -- 1. Artificial Intelligence and the Modern Productivity Paradox: A Clash of Expectations and Statistics / Erik Brynjolfsson, Daniel Rock, and Chad Syverson, Comment: Rebecca...

This paper evaluates the impact of slowing economic growth on labor market dynamism and misallocation. It provides a model of endogenous growth via imitation in a frictional labor market. The framework accounts for rich data on worker job-to-job transitions as well as stochastic and lifecycle...

We study the relationship between international trade and development in a model where countries differ in their capability, goods differ in their complexity, and capability growth is a function of a country's pattern of specialization. Theoretically, we show that it is possible for...