Agriculture's share of economic activity is known to vary inversely with a country's level of development. This paper examines whether extensions of the neoclassical growth model can account for some important sectoral patterns observed in a current cross-section of countries and in the time...

In an attempt to account for the huge observed disparity in international incomes, several recent papers study models in the spirit of Solow (1960) where the adoptions of better technologies require investments in new equipment. This paper continues this line of research. It describes an economy...

This paper analyzes the decision of a group of specialized workers to form a guild and block the adoption of a new technology that does not require their specialized input. The theory predicts an inverted-U relation between guilds and market size: for small markets, firm profits are insufficient...

We analyze risk sharing and endogenous fiscal spending in a two-region model with sequentially complete markets. Fiscal policy is determined by majority voting. When policy setting is decentralized, regions choose fiscal spending in an attempt to manipulate security prices. This leads to...