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...

This paper will discuss how the Financial Crisis of 2008 has thrown neoliberalism into a deep legitimation crisis. Over the past four decades the neoliberal ethic of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher has permeated American life both public and private. The principles of the laissez faire...

The marginal product of human capital in Mankiw, Romer, and Weil's [1992] augmented Solow model measures the direct and two external effects of human capital created from schooling on national income. If this model is valid, its estimates of the share of this marginal product accruing to workers...

This paper examines the effect of agricultural development on a country's overall development and growth experience. In most poor countries, large fractions of land, labor, and other productive resources are devoted to producing food for subsistence needs. This food problem can delay a country's...

Distortions in private investment due to credit frictions, and in public investment due to corruption and bureaucratic inefficiencies, have both been suggested as important factors in accounting for the cross-country per capita income distribution. We introduce two modifications to the standard...

Variation in factor shares, extensively documented in recent years, implies that standard growth accounting exercises are plagued by measurement issues. First, the standard assumption of constant shares generates a bias in the estimation of the contribution of factors to economic growth. Second,...

We develop a classical macroeconomic model to examine the growth and distributional consequences of education. Contrary to the received wisdom, we show that human capital accumulation is not necessarily growth-inducing and inequality-reducing. Expansive education policies may foster growth and...

The Agricultural Productivity Gap (APG) - the ratio of the average labor productivity in non-agriculture to that in agriculture - tends to be very large in developing countries and potentially represents misallocation of resources. This paper makes three contributions to the literature on APG....

This paper studies the impact of U.S. immigration barriers on global knowledge production. We present four key findings. First, among Nobel Prize winners and Fields Medalists, migrants to the U.S. play a central role in the global knowledge network—representing 20-33% of the frontier knowledge...

The economic impact of Artificial Intelligence (AI) is studied using a (semi) endogenous growth model with two novel features. First, the task approach from labor economics is reformulated and integrated into a growth model. Second, the standard representative household assumption is rejected,...