The phenomenon of workers moving from a poor to a rich economy is high on the political agenda. When a worker moves to a richer economy, what is gained by the move? The empirical challenge in giving an answer stems from the difficulty to disentangle income differences from many other...

We investigate links between routine-biased technical change, the structure of occupational employment, and cross-country income differences. To implement this, we combine several data sources including national labour force surveys and Penn World Tables. We first document that in our novel...

This paper looks at the implications for monetary policy of the widespread adoption of artificial intelligence and machine learning, which is sometimes called the "fourth industrial revolution". The paper reviews experiences from the previous three industrial revolutions, developing a template...

The U.S. went through a remarkable structural transformation between 1800 and 2000. In 1800 the majority of people worked in agriculture. Barely anyone did by 2000. What caused the rapid demise of agriculture in the economy? The analysis here concentrates on the development of new consumer goods...

Since World War II there has been: (i) a rise in the fraction of time that married households allocate to market work, (ii) an increase in the rate of divorce, and (iii) a decline in the rate of marriage. It is argued here that labor-saving technological progress in the household sector can...

We offer a macroeconomic assessment of China’s Reform Period, highlighting several neglected channels underlining its great expansion. Estimating the supply side of the post-Reform economy reveals the relatively high (above unity) value of the elasticity of factor substitution and the...

From its flow tide, fueled by the Cold War, to its ebbing with the anti-growth movement and the economic crises of the early 1970s, the "growthmen" of MIT stood at the center of the dominant field in macroeconomics. The history of MIT growth economics is traced from Solow's seminal neoclassical...