The standard baseline estimate in development accounting is imprecise because of a mismatch between the estimate of physical capital and the estimate of physical capital’s share, the fraction of total income accruing to physical capital. I adjust for this mismatch, and in so doing, incorporate...

Development accounting depends on two simplifying assumptions, that economies can be represented by a common aggregate production function and that aggregate factors of production are paid their social marginal products. An aggregate production function can explain income across countries, but...

The average Latin American country produces about 1 fifth of the output per worker of the US. What are the sources of these enormous income gaps? I report development-accounting results for Latin America. On average Latin America’s overall physical and human capital endowment relative to the...

We re-estimate the World Technology Frontier (WTF) non-parametrically, using the Data Envelopment Analysis method, with a dataset covering both OECD country-level and US state-level data on GDP per worker and the stocks of physical capital, unskilled labor, and skilled labor. The WTF 2000 is...

Using recently available large-sample micro data from 36 countries, we document that experience-earnings profiles are flatter in poor countries than in rich countries. Motivated by this fact, we conduct a development accounting exercise that allows the returns to experience to vary across...

This paper assesses the relationship between institutions, output, and productivity, when official output is corrected for the size of the shadow economy. Our results confirm the usual positive impact of institutional quality on official output and total factor productivity, and its negative...

We construct and estimate a unified model combining three of the main sources of cross-country income disparities: differences in factor endowments, barriers to technology adoption and the inappropriateness of frontier technologies to local conditions. The key components are different types of...

This work provides data on human capital for the Guarani Jesuit missions during the 18th century. Based on the age heaping methodology, the results of a large sample (over 3,600 observations) suggest that the knowledge of numerical skills in these missions was exceptional. A comparison with...

Despite sound policies and institutions, Danish productivity has grown modestly over the past decade, both historically and in relation to other countries, contributing to weak economic growth and an erosion in competitiveness. An examination of the four potential drivers of this puzzle, namely...

While South Africa has made significant improvements in basic and tertiary education enrollment, the country still suffers from significant challenges in the quality of educational achievement by almost any international metric. The paper finds that money is clearly not the main issue since the...