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 documents the large differences in hours of work across OECD countries and shows how these differences have evolved over time. It argues that changes in technology and government can potentially account for the broad patterns of change. (Copyright: Elsevier)

This paper studies lifetime aggregate labor supply with endogenous workweek length. Such a theory is needed to evaluate various government policies. A key feature of our model is a nonlinear mapping from hours worked to labor services. This gives rise to an endogenous workweek that can differ...

We formulate a version of the growth model in which production is carried out by heterogeneous establishments and calibrate it to U.S. data. In the context of this model we argue that differences in the allocation of resources across establishments that differ in productivity may be an important...

This paper extends the Lucas-Prescott island economy to allow for finite lived agents and sector specific human capital. Unlike the Lucas-Prescott model in which workers who leave declining sectors find employment in expanding sectors, this models predicts that workers who leave declining...

A large portion of differences in output per capita across countries is explained by differences in total factor productivity (TFP). In this article, we summarize a recent literature — and the articles in this special issue on misallocation and productivity — that focus on the...

We introduce household production and the production of houses (construction) into a monetary model. Theory predicts inflation, as a tax on market activity, encourages substitution into household production and hence investment in housing. In the model, the stock and appropriately-deflated price...

Coinciding with the start of the housing boom were large increases in home-equity lending and loan-to-equity ratios. We study this in models where housing bears a liquidity premium because it collateralizes loans. Even with fundamentals constant, since liquidity depends on beliefs,...

What are the conditions under which Gresham's Law holds? And what are the mechanics of a debasement? To analyze these questions, we develop a model of commodity money with light and heavy coins, imperfect information, and prices determined via bilateral bargaining. There are equilibria with...