There are large differences in welfare — measured as gross domestic product (GDP) per capita — across nations. Over time, there are numerous country experiences in relative income of catch-up, collapse, and catch-up followed by a decline. What explains why some countries are rich and others...

We study the business cycle properties of exchange rates and other macro-economic variables in a panel of developed and developing countries. We find substantial variation in the degree of co-movement of exchange rates with other macroeconomic variables across countries in our sample. Moreover,...

We develop a quantitative theory of human capital with heterogeneous agents in order to assess the sources of cross-country income differences. The cross-sectional implications of the theory and U.S. data are used to restrict the parameters of human capital technology. We then assess the model's...

In this article, we document three remarkable facts about the distribution of output per worker (labor productivity) across countries between 1960 and 1996. First, there is a large disparity in labor productivity across countries in the world. Second, disparity has increased substantially since...

An important feature of the U.S. labor market is that, even after controlling for measurable differences in education and experience, the average wage of women with children is 89 percent of the average wage of women without children. This "family gap" in wages accounts for almost half the...

Using panel data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY), we document that gender differences in wages almost double during the first 20 years of labor market experience and that there are substantial gender differences in employment and hours of work during the life cycle. A large...