A number of plausible theories offer explanations for the propensity of many young industries to undergo a shakeout phase, during which the number of firms declines sharply in the face of continued rising output. However, none of the theories considers the role of labor market sorting. This...

The process of economic development is characterized by substantial reallocations of resources across sectors. In this paper, we construct a multi-sector model in which there are barriers to the movement of labor from low-productivity traditional agriculture to modern sectors. With the barrier...

This paper develops a neoclassical growth model with leisure externalities. Ignoring positive (negative) leisure externalities leads to equilibrium consumption, labor and capital that are too high (low) and leisure that is too low (high). The government should tax (subsidize) labor income...

This paper focuses on the role of government capital as a critical productive input when the level of services that the agent derives from it is subject to congestion. I develop a two-sector “nonscale” production model in which there are two types of firms, conventional profit-maximizing...

I develop a model with status concerns to analyze how different economic factors affect female participation, average household income and wage, as well as the welfare of both stay-at-home and working wives. Reductions in the price of domestic goods and increases in female wages have positive...

Persistent trends in R&D intensity and educational attainment, in conjunction with the absence of any trend in per capita income growth, are inconsistent with the predictions of most growth models. Jones (2002) has made a strong point that the data are consistent with out-of-steady state...

Jaffe, Trajtenberg and Henderson (Quarterly Journal of Economics, 108(3):577-98, 1993) developed a matching method to study the geography of knowledge spillovers using patent citations, and found that knowledge spillovers are strongly localized. Their method matches each citing patent to a...

This paper produces new estimates of the rate of organizational forgetting in the well-known case study of US wartime ship production. I show that estimation is easily colored by problems of unobserved product heterogeneity and sensitivity to specification of the learning curve. Using data...

We construct a simple model of occupational choice among agents with differing abilities. The fraction of agents creating new businesses who are low ability rises during recessions. Thus, cohorts born during recessions are on average lower quality: their businesses yield lower initial earnings,...