This paper builds a theory of the shape of the distribution of total-factor productivity (TFP) across countries. The data on productivity suggests vast differences across countries, and arguably even has \twin peaks". The theory proposed here is consistent with vast differences in long-run...

In February 2022, Russia launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine. The ensuing war has a devastating destructing impact in Ukraine. This article focuses on the humanitarian cost of war. The article develops a framework for the analysis of the effect of a war on country's human capital. We then...

In earlier work (Bénabou, Ticchi and Vindigni 2013) we uncovered a robust negative association between religiosity and patents per capita, holding across countries as well as US states, with and without controls. In this paper we turn to the individual level, examining the relationship between...

We study the relationship between geography and growth. To do so, we first develop a dynamic spatial growth theory with realistic geography. We characterize the model and its balanced growth path and propose a methodology to analyze equilibria with different levels of migration frictions. We...

A competitive stock market is embedded into a neoclassical growth economy to analyze the interplay between the acquisition of information about firms, its partial revelation through stock prices, capital allocation and income. The stock market allows investors to share their costly private...

Unlike economies as a whole, manufacturing industries exhibit unconditional convergence in labor productivity. The paper documents this finding for 4-digit manufacturing sectors for a large group of developed and developing countries over the period since 1990. The coefficient of unconditional...

We show that financial sector bailouts and sovereign credit risk are intimately linked. A bailout benefits the economy by ameliorating the under-investment problem of the financial sector. However, increasing taxation of the non-financial sector to fund the bailout may be inefficient since it...

We provide evidence on the real effects of credit supply shocks utilizing a new firm-level database from six Latin American countries between 1990 to 2005. Holding creditworthiness constant through foreign currency debt exposure, we compare investment undertaken by domestic exporters to that of...

Modern growth theory puts invention on the center stage. Inventions are created by individuals, raising the question: can we increase number of inventors? To answer this question, we study the causal effect of M.Sc. engineering education on invention, using data on U.S. patents’ Finnish...

Spain's financial position during the late 19th and early 20th century has usually been presented as one of persistent deficit on current account, which resulted from her integration into international commodity and factor markets and this, in turn, slowed down growth. In this essay a...