We study the effect of capital controls on the level of investment in human capital and the resulting growth path of an economy. The economy consists of two groups of agents based on the ownership of factors of production. One type of agents - called workers - own human capital and bequeath...

Over the past decade, research explaining cross country income differences has increasingly pointed to the dominant role of total factor productivity (TFP) gaps as opposed to factor accumulation. Nevertheless, it is a widely held belief that a country's ability to absorb and implement...

This paper provides a framework which decomposes aggregate TFP into a component reflecting relative efficiency across sectors, and another component which reflects the absolute level of efficiency. A development accounting analysis suggests that as much as 85 percent of the international...

This paper empirically investigates the impact of willingness to take risks on the likelihood of being an entrepreneur. We use a quarter-century of data on second-generation Americans from Current Population Surveys in conjunction with country-level measures of willingness to take risks from the...

A large body of research on India’s rapid economic growth since 1991 also documents increasing regional disparities. In this paper, we use unsaturated night light data to challenge this dominant narrative of unequal growth. For 520 districts spanning a 15 year period (1996-2010), we find...

We explore the extent to which present day economic development at the sub-national level, captured by GDP per capita, urbanization, and night-time light density, is correlated to regional economic development in the year 1850. Drawing on historical city data, we construct a measure of urban...

This paper exploits the dual accounting technique to uncover multi-factor productivity growth patterns for goods and services across US states from 1980 to 2007. Due to changes in sectoral classifications, the period is divided into two parts, 1980-1997 and 1998-2007. Over both periods, states...