Living arrangements have changed enormously over the last two centuries. While the average American today lives in a household of only three people, in 1850 household size was twice that figure. Further, both the number of children and the number of adults in a household have fallen...

How much does life-cycle human capital accumulation vary across countries? This paper seeks to answer this question by studying U.S. immigrants, who come from a wide variety of countries but work in a common labor market. We document that returns to potential experience among U.S. immigrants are...

Existing models of structural change typically assume that all of investment is produced in manufacturing. This assumption is strongly counterfactual: in the postwar US, the share of services value added in investment expenditure has been steadily growing and it now exceeds 0.5. We build a new...

We ask what specification of preferences can account for the changes in the expenditure shares of broad sectors that are associated with the process of structural transformation in the U.S. since 1947. Following the tradition of the expenditure systems literature, we first calibrate utility...

Structural transformation refers to the reallocation of economic activity across the broad sectors agriculture, manufacturing and services. This review article synthesizes and evaluates recent advances in the research on structural transformation. We begin by presenting the stylized facts of...

We use international household-survey data to document that experience-wage profiles are flatter in poorer countries than in richer countries. We find a quantitatively similar pattern when we estimate returns to foreign experience by country of origin among U.S. immigrants. The most likely...