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Working Paper
The Economic Gains from Equity
How much is inequity costing us? Using a simple growth accounting framework we apply standard shift-share techniques to data from the Current Population Survey (1990-2019) to compute the aggregate economic costs of persistent educational and labor market disparities by gender and race. We find significant economic losses associated with these gaps. Building on this finding, we consider which disparities generate the largest costs, paying specific attention to differences in employment, hours worked, educational attainment, educational utilization, and occupational allocation. We also examine ...
Working Paper
“Free” Internet Content: Web 1.0, Web 2.0, and the Sources of Economic Growth
The Internet has evolved from Web 1.0, with static web pages and limited interactivity, to Web 2.0, with dynamic content that relies on user engagement. This change increased production costs significantly, but the price charged for Internet content has generally remained the same: zero. Because no transaction records the ?purchase? of this content, its value is not reflected in measured growth and productivity. To capture the contribution of the ?free? Internet, we model the provision of ?free? content as a barter transaction between the content users and the content creators, and we value ...
Working Paper
Capital Goods Trade, Relative Prices, and Economic Development
International trade in capital goods has quantitatively important effects on economic development through capital formation and TFP. Capital goods trade enables poor countries to access more efficient technologies, leading to lower relative prices of capital goods and higher capital-output ratios. Moreover, poor countries can use their comparative advantage and allocate their resources more efficiently, and increase their TFP. We quantify these channels using a multisector, multicountry, Ricardian model of trade with capital accumulation. The model matches several trade and development facts ...
Working Paper
The Making of an Economic Superpower―Unlocking China’s Secret of Rapid Industrialization
The rise of China is no doubt the most important event in world economic history since the Industrial Revolution. The institutional theory of development based on a dichotomy of extractive vs. inclusive political institutions cannot explain China?s rise. This article argues that only a radical reinterpretation of the history of the Industrial Revolution and the rise of the West (as incorrectly portrayed by the institutional theory) can fully explain China?s growth miracle and why the determined rise of China is unstoppable. Conversely, China?s spectacular and rapid transformation from an ...
Working Paper
Family Economics Writ Large
Powerful currents have reshaped the structure of families over the last century. There has been (i) a dramatic drop in fertility and greater parental investment in children; (ii) a rise in married female labor-force participation; (iii) a significant decline in marriage and a rise in divorce; (iv) a higher degree of positive assortative mating; (v) more children living with a single mother; (vi) shifts in social norms governing premarital sex and married women's roles in the workplace. Macroeconomic models explaining these aggregate trends are surveyed. The relent-less flow of technological ...
Working Paper
A Unified Framework to Estimate Macroeconomic Stars
We develop a flexible semi-structural time-series model to estimate jointly several macroeconomic "stars" — i.e., unobserved long-run equilibrium levels of output (and growth rate of output), the unemployment rate, the real rate of interest, productivity growth, the price inflation, and wage inflation. The ingredients of the model are in part motivated by economic theory and in part by the empirical features necessitated by the changing economic environment. Following the recent literature on inflation and interest rate modeling, we explicitly model the links between long-run survey ...
Working Paper
Gross Migration, Housing and Urban Population Dynamics
Cities experience significant, near random walk productivity shocks, yet population is slow to adjust. In practise local population changes are dominated by variation in net migration, and we argue that understanding gross migration is essential to quantify how net migration may slow population adjustments. Housing is also a natural candidate for slowing population adjustments because it is difficult to move, costly to build quickly, and a large durable stock makes a city attractive to potential migrants. We quantify the influence of migration and housing on urban population dynamics using a ...
Working Paper
Expanded GDP for Welfare Measurement in the 21st Century
The information revolution currently underway has changed the economy in ways that are hard to measure using conventional GDP procedures. The information available to consumers has increased dramatically as a result of the Internet and its applications, and new mobile communication devices have greatly increased the speed and reach of its accessibility. An individual now has an unprecedented amount of information on which to base consumption choices, and the “free” nature of the information provided means that the resulting benefits largely bypass GDP and accrue directly to consumers. ...
Working Paper
Barriers to Creative Destruction: Large Firms and Nonproductive Strategies
This working paper reviews recent empirical evidence on large firms and nonproductivestrategies that hinder creative destruction and reallocation. The focus is on three types ofnonproductive strategies: political connections, nonproductive patenting, and anticompetitiveacquisitions. Across different contexts using granular micro data sets, we overwhelmingly see that asfirms gain market share, they increasingly rely on nonproductive strategies but reduce theirproductive, innovation-based strategies. I also discuss theoretical channels, aggregate implications,and potentials for some policies.
Working Paper
Comparative Advantage and Moonlighting
The proportion of multiple jobholders (moonlighters) is negatively correlated with productivity (wages) in cross-sectional and time series data, but positively correlated with education. We develop a model of the labor market to understand these seemingly contradictory facts. An income e?ect explains the negative correlation with productivity while a comparative advantage of skilled workers explains the positive correlation with education. We provide empirical evidence of the comparative advantage in CPS data. We calibrate the model to 1994 data on multiple jobholdings, and assess its ability ...