This research explores the effects of distance to the pre-industrial technological frontiers on comparative economic development in the course of human history. It establishes theoretically and empirically that distance to the frontier had a persistent non-monotonic effect on a country's...

In the conventional neoclassical growth model, technical change is generally characterized as “purely labor-augmenting,” a restriction that limits modern civilization to super-humans living in the Stone Age. As a novel and radical departure from conventional growth theory, the model...

This paper deals with the role of ICTs in the recent productivity slowdown, and with their possible future impact on productivity in developed countries: the United States (US), the Euro Area (EA), the United Kingdom (UK) and Japan. Few papers analyze the recent slowdown of the ICT contribution...

In the presence of markup differences, externalities and other social considerations, the equilibrium direction of innovation can be systematically distorted. This paper builds a simple model of endogenous technology, which generalizes existing comparative static results and characterizes...

Theory predicts that global economic growth will stagnate and even come to an end due to slower and eventually negative growth in population. It has been claimed, however, that Artificial Intelligence (AI) may counter this and even cause an economic growth explosion. In this paper, we critically...

Why do some countries industrialize much earlier than others? One widely-accepted answer is that markets need to be large enough for producers to find it profitable to bear the fixed cost of introducing modern technologies. This insight, however, has limited explanatory power, as illustrated by...

The world is banking on a major increase in food production, if the dietary needs and food preferences of an increasing, and increasingly rich, population are to be met. This requires the further expansion of modern agriculture, but modern agriculture rests on a small number of highly productive...

This paper surveys the experience of economic growth in the 20th century with a focus on technological change at the frontier together with issues related to success and failure in catch-up growth. A detailed account of growth performance based on historical national accounts data is given and...

This research explores the historical roots of the division of labor in pre-modern societies. It advances the hypothesis and establishes empirically that intra-ethnic diversity had a positive effect on the division of labor across ethnicities in the pre-modern era. Exploiting a variety of...

This paper explores the implications of Unified Growth Theory for the origins of existing differences in income per capita across countries. The theory sheds light on three fundamental layers of comparative development. It identifies the factors that have governed the pace of the transition from...