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Journal Article
Exchange rates and business cycles across countries
Journal Article
Recent developments in economic growth
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 poor? What are the determinants of catch up and collapse in relative income for individual countries? Assessing the determinants of income levels and growth across countries has been a challenging and exciting task in the recent literature of growth economics. I review the literature with a focus on ...
Working Paper
Explaining Educational Attainment across Countries and over Time
Consider the following facts. In 1950, the richest countries attained an average of 8 years of schooling whereas the poorest countries 1.3 years, a large 6-fold difference. By 2005, the difference in schooling declined to 2-fold because schooling increased faster in poor than in rich countries. What explains educational attainment differences across countries and their evolution over time? We consider an otherwise standard model of schooling featuring non- homothetic preferences and a labor supply margin to assess the quantitative contribution of productivity and life expectancy in explaining ...
Journal Article
The productivity of nations
Working Paper
A general equilibrium analysis of parental leave policies
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 gender gap in wages. Proponents of mandatory-leave policies argue that career interruptions associated with fertility have long-lasting effects on female employment and are costly in terms of human-capital losses for females. Despite the fact that mandatory leaves are widely applied in developed ...
Working Paper
A quantitative theory of the gender gap in wages
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 portion of gender differences in labor market attachment can be traced to the impact of children on the labor supply of women. We develop a quantitative life-cycle model of fertility, labor supply, and human capital accumulation decisions. We use this model to assess the role of fertility on gender ...
Working Paper
On the aggregate and distributional implications of productivity differences across countries
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 ability to explain the cross-country data. Our quantitative model generates a total-factor-productivity (TFP) elasticity of output per worker of 2.8. This implies that a factor of 3 difference in TFP is amplified through physical and human capital accumulation to generate a factor of 20 difference in ...