This paper offers the first systematic historical evidence on the role of a central actor in modern growth theory - the engineer. It collects cross-country and state level data on the labor share of engineers for the Americas, and county level data on engineering and patenting for the US during...

Using newly collected national and sub-national data and historical case studies, this paper argues that differences in innovative capacity, captured by the density of engineers at the dawn of the Second Industrial Revolution, are important to explaining present income differences, and, in...

Maloney develops a view of the informal sector in developing countries primarily as an unregulated micro-entrepreneurial sector and not as a disadvantaged residual of segmented labor markets. Drawing on recent work from Latin America, he offers alternative explanations for many of the...

Latin America missed opportunities for rapid resource-based growth that similarly endowed countries - Australia, Canada, Scandinavia - were able to take advantage of. Fundamental to this poor performance was deficient technological adoption driven by two factors. First, deficient national...

Data provide only mixed support for the idea that trade liberalization has an impact on own-wage labor demand elasticities. If globalization is making the lives of workers more insecure, it is probably working through some other mechanism.There are concerns that trade reform and globalization...

The share of the workforce in self-employment and the level of turnover are shown to be unreliable measures of labor market distortion and rigidity. Both are shown to be more affected by standard economic and demographic variables - the level of formal sector productivity, real interest rates,...

This paper offers the first evidence on the prevalence of a central actor in modern growth theory?the engineer. Using newly collected sub-national, and international data as well as historical case studies, it then argues that differences in innovative capacity, captured by the density of...