It is well known that there are big cross-country differences in aggregate TFP. Are these differences uniform across sectors or are they driven by even larger TFP differences in specific sectors? Some forty years ago, Balassa and Samuelson hypothesized that the biggest TFP differences are in the...

We ask how barriers to international trade affect TFP when there are monopoly rights in the import-competing industries. Holmes and Schmitz (1995) show that without barriers to trade TFP in these industries is as large as possible. We study the general case of finite barriers to trade. We find...

One of the most challenging questions in economics is why some countries are so much richer than others. In this paper, we assess the role of cross-country differences in barriers to entry. This is motivated by the recent evidence about both their prevalence in the third world and their harmful...

This paper explores the stability properties of the steady state in the standard two-sector real business cycle model with a sector-specific externality in the capital-producing sector. When the steady state is stable then equilibrium is indeterminate and stable sunspots are possible. We find...

It is well known that if mild sector-specific externalities are considered, then the steady state of the standard two-sector real business cycle model can become locally indeterminate and endogenous business cycles can arise. We show that this result is not robust to the introduction of standard...

This paper explores the local stability properties of the steady state in the twosector neoclassical growth model with sector-specific externalities. We show analytically that capital adjustment costs of any size preclude local indeterminacy nearby the steady state for every empirically...

Standard growth accounting exercises find large cross-country differences in aggregate TFP. Here we ask whether specific sectors are driving these differences, and, if this is the case, which these problem sectors are. We argue that to answer these questions we need to consider four sectors. In...

We assess the empirical importance of income and price effects for structural transformation in the postwar US. We explain two natural approaches to the data: sectors may be categories of final expenditure or value added; e.g., the service sector may be the final expenditure on services or the value...

Models with externalities have become increasingly popular for studying both long-term growth and business-cycle fluctuations. Externalities can lead to indeterminacy, allowing self-fulfilling expectations to determine the equilibrium. This paper argues that the importance of indeterminacy might...

It is well known that if there are mild sector-specific externalities, then the steady state of the standard two-sector real business cycle model can become locally indeterminate and endogenous business cycles can arise. We show that this result is not robust to the introduction of standard...