Why are some countries so much richer than others? Development Accounting is a first-pass attempt at organizing the answer around two proximate determinants: factors of production and efficiency. It answers the question ‘how much of the cross-country income variance can be attributed to...

In skill-biased (deskilling) technological revolutions, learning investments required by new machines are greater (smaller) than those required by preexisting machines. Skill-biased (deskilling) revolutions trigger reallocations of capital from slow- (fast-) to fast- (slow-) learning workers,...

This paper introduces various sources of consumer heterogeneity in one-sector representative consumer (RC) growth models and develops tools to study the evolution of the distribution of consumptions, assets, and incomes. These tools are applied to the Ramsey-Cass-Koopmans model of optimal...

We present a simple theory of the quality (competence and honesty) of elected officials. Our theory offers four main insights. Low-quality citizens have a 'comparative advantage' in pursuing elective office, because their market wages are lower than those of high-quality citizens (competence),...

We present a theory of ethnic conflict in which coalitions formed along ethnic lines compete for the economy%u2019s resources. The role of ethnicity is to enforce coalition membership: in ethnically homogeneous societies members of the losing coalition can defect to the winners at low cost, and...

We use a panel of 16 OECD countries over several decades to investigate the effects of government debts and deficits on long-term interest rates. In simple static specifications, a one-percentage-point increase in the primary deficit relative to GDP increases contemporaneous long-term interest...

We compare the economic consequences and political feasibility of reforms aimed at reducing barriers to entry (deregulation) and improving contractual enforcement (legal reform). Deregulation fosters entry, thereby increasing the number of firms (entrepreneurship) and the average quality of...

There are two sources of inconsistency in existing cross-country empirical work on growth: correlated individual effects and endogenous explanatory variables. We estimate a variety of cross-country growth regressions using a generalized method of moments estimator that eliminates both problems....

We present a simple theory of the quality of elected officials. Quality has (at least) two dimensions: competence and honesty. Voters prefer competent and honest policymakers, so high-quality citizens have a greater chance of being elected to office. But low-quality citizens have a...