A decomposition of aggregate labor productivity based on internationally comparable data from FAO and Penn World Tables reveals that high labor shares and low productivity in agriculture are mainly responsible for poor countries<92> current position in the world income distribution. Using a...</92>

We use the returns on a set of international financial securities to identify exogenous shocks to the Canadian federal surplus. We find that a large portion of the variation in the surplus can be replicated by a linear combination of these returns and that the rising debt observed in the 1980s...

Parents invest differently in sons and daughters. This paper formally re-examines the application of the Trivers Willard hypothesis to humans. Differential fecundity and assortive matching in marriage are necessary for parents to invest differently in the skills of their sons and daughters....

This paper develops a two-sector model that illuminates the role played by agricultural modernization in the transition from stagnation to growth. When agriculture relies on traditional technology, industrial development reduces the relative price of industrial products, but has a limited effect...

The return to sound fiscal policy after the high budget deficits of the 1980s and early 1990s has been hailed by many as the Clinton administration's most important achievement. In this article, we evaluate post-war, US fiscal policy using an extension of Barro's (1979) tax-smoothing model,...

Women are fecund for a shorter period of their lives than men. In monogamous societies with divorce and remarriage, fecund women are relatively scarce. This paper studies how parents, who maximize discounted dynastic consumption, invest in the survival of their sons and daughters. The theory...

A decomposition of aggregate labor productivity based on internationally comparable data reveals that a high share of employment and low labor productivity in agriculture are mainly responsible for low aggregate productivity in poor countries. Using a two-sector general-equilibrium model, we...

In this article we argue that the evaluation and implementation of Canadian fiscal policy could be significantly improved through the systematic use of information provided by global financial markets. In particular, we show how the information contained in internationally traded asset returns...