This paper provides a unified growth theory, i.e. a model that explains the very long-run economic and demographic development path of industrialized economies, stretching from the pre-industrial era to present-day and beyond. Making strict use of Malthus’ (1798) so-called preventive check...

We investigate the hypothesis that macroeconomic fluctuations are primitively the results of many microeconomic shocks, and show that it has significant explanatory power for the evolution of macroeconomic volatility. We define “fundamental” volatility as the volatility that would arise from...

We consider a two-sector economy, where public infrastructure unevenly affects the productivity of the sectors. Private and public capital are produced with different technologies, and the sector producing the infrastructure is not benefiting from its services. The government provides both...

This paper presents a tractable endogenous two-sector growth model with non-Gorman intra-temporal preferences and directed technical change. One of the two consumption goods is a necessity, whereas the other is a luxury. If the economy starts with a low initial knowledge stock, households are...

In the course of growth, sectoral data features (i) changing relative expenditures of different sectors, (ii) non-constancy in the growth rates of relative prices and (iii) shifting relative TFP growth rates of sectors. This paper presents a simple model of directed technical change, which is...

This paper develops a two-sector R&D-based growth model with congestion effects from increasing urban population density. We show that endogenous technological progress causes structural change if there are positive productivity spillovers from the modern to the traditional sector and Engel’s...

The Kuznets-Kaldor stylized facts are one of the most striking empirical observations about the development process in the industrialized countries: While massive factor reallocation across technologically distinct sectors takes place, the aggregate ratios of the economy are quite stable. This...

This paper analyzes the relationship between financial repression and structural change. We present a simple theoretical model of structural transformation in which the impact of financial repression on unbalanced growth is studied. The model suggests that governments may choose to repress the...

This paper studies the policy determinants of economic transition and estimates the demand for labor in the infant private sector in urban China. We show that a reform that untied access to housing in urban areas from working for the state sector accounts for more than a quarter of the overall...

The U.S. Energy Information Administration regularly publishes short-term forecasts of the price of crude oil. Traditionally, such out-of-sample forecasts have been largely judgmental, making them difficult to replicate and justify, and not particularly successful when compared with naïve...