This paper argues that the single most important factor that explains East Asia's development success was its fast structural transformation toward industrialization, manufacturing in particular. Workers moved out of agriculture into manufacturing, and the sector diversified and upgraded its...

'This is an extremely important and long-awaited book. The authors provide a cogent guide to all that is wrong with the theory and empirical applications of the discredited notion of an aggregate production function. Their critique has devastating implications for orthodox macroeconomics.'...

We show that Autor and Salomons' (2017, 2018) analysis of the impact of technical progress on employment growth is problematic. When they use labor productivity growth as a proxy for technical progress, their regressions are quasi-accounting identities that omit one variable of the identity....

This paper shows that because growth models in the tradition of Solow's and Romer's are framed in terms of production functions, they are equally subject to a criticism developed by, among others, Phelps Brown (1957), Simon (1979a), and Samuelson (1979). These authors argued that production...

The debate about whether technical progress causes technological unemployment, as the Luddites argued in the early 19th century, has recently resurfaced in the context of new technologies and automation and the so-called Fourth Industrial Revolution. We review the main issues and then consider...

We provide the first evidence that low- and middle-income countries with high education levels were more successful in developing comparative advantage in products unrelated to those they already export. In contrast, controlling for the relatedness of target products to these countries' exports,...