Structural transformation is a central driver of economic development, yet recent challenges such as premature deindustrialization have raised critical questions about whether low-income economies can still follow traditional growth paths that rely on manufacturing expansion to drive...

Moretti (2021a,b) (henceforth M21) studies agglomeration effects for innovation, testing whether the size of technology clusters causes patenting. Agglomeration effects are important for understanding technological progress (Kerr and Robert-Nicoud, 2020), and are affected by constraints on...

This study provides new evidence on how production digitalization investment affects firm financial performance across diverse European regions. A panel of 14,935 firm-year observations from 30 countries (2012-2022), including a focused Baltic subsample, is used alongside a refined digital...

This paper reviews the contributions of the 2025 Nobel Prize in Economics laureates, Joel Mokyr, Philippe Aghion and Peter Howitt, to our understanding of innovation-driven economic growth, situating their work within the broader evolution of modern growth theory and empirical evidence. It...

This paper reviews the process of structural transformation (ST) across a wide range of Asian economies. After outlining key theories of ST, it documents Asia's transformation and compares it with patterns observed elsewhere, using standard indicators and broader dimensions of structural change....

Does artificial intelligence (AI) increase productivity - and does it displace workers? We examine aggregate effects using administrative data covering essentially all U.S. employers in a difference-in-differences design exploiting occupational AI exposure across industries and states. A one...

I empirically measure the effectiveness of high-yielding variety (HYV) seeds and irrigation in adapting to climate-related agricultural productivity shocks using data on agriculture production from 1966 to 2011. I find that the usage of these additional inputs in production reduces the impact of...

Recent evidence suggests that Chinese imports negatively impact firm-level productivity growth in the EU. We argue that this effect is moderated by the technological frontier, as proposed by Acemoglu et al. (2006). Using three distinct measures of the frontier, we examined firm-level data from...

This paper examines how proposed U.S. restrictions on international students would affect the nation's STEM workforce and long-run economic growth. Focusing on the most common pipeline from U.S. universities to the labor market, we show that international education is the principal mechanism by...

Total factor productivity (TFP) is crucial for evaluating technological innovation, yet its accurate measurement remains challenging due to diverse methodologies. Notably, the selection of proxy variables in control function approach (CFA) significantly influences TFP estimation, yet existing...

This study examines whether size-contingent employment regulations are associated with distortions in firm size distribution and whether such patterns are more consistent with productivity-based selection or with broader constraints on firm scaling. Using 2024 census data covering 86,758 formal...

This study examines the efficiency and productivity of public education expenditure in 20 countries using Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) and the Malmquist Productivity Index over the period 2011-2023. Focusing on science and mathematics performance at the primary and lower-secondary levels, the...

We study the interconnection between the productivity and pricing effects of financial shocks. Combining administrative records on firm-level output prices and quantities with quasi-experimental variation in credit supply, we show that a tightening of credit conditions has a persistent, yet...

This paper makes an initial attempt to account for differences in the technologies used by women- and men-run businesses, that is, technological “heterogeneity,” for better understanding productivity differences between the two groups. The paper applies meta frontier analysis to the...

This paper examines agriculture growth performance in 20 countries in West and Central Africa over 2001–23. Most countries in the region continued to depend on land expansion to raise agricultural output. However, two countries in West Africa, Ghana and Senegal, stand apart. Over these two...

This paper investigates the extent to which the historical legacy of apartheid laws explains contemporary misallocation and firm productivity in South Africa. During the apartheid era (1948-1994), job reservations, closed-shop agreements, and minimum-wage policies were implemented to restrict...

Wage dispersion and job-to-job mobility are central features of modern labour markets, yet canonical equilibrium search models with exogenous job-offer ladders struggle to jointly account for these facts and the magnitude of frictional wage inequality. We develop a continuous-time equilibrium...

This paper examines the implications of heterogeneity in construction productivity on cross-country income disparity. Using a sample of 168 countries, we estimate the 10:1 spread in construction productivity as a factor of 49-fold in 2017. The construction productivity gap falls by 46 percent...

Gender gaps in earnings persist even among high-skilled workers, partly because men and women often perform different tasks within and across jobs. We study a rare setting in which high-skilled men and women perform the same tasks under comparable conditions, allowing us to assess gender...

Investment has been low in the last decades (both by firms and by government). This does not only hold for fixed capital including R&D, but also for investment in climate, housing, infrastructure and education. Productivity has been low too and should be stimulated, as is elaborated in the...

Gender gaps in earnings persist even among high-skilled workers, in part because men and women often perform different tasks within and across jobs. We study a rare setting in which high-skilled men and women perform the same tasks under comparable conditions, allowing us to assess gender...

This study characterizes optimal policy in an endogenous growth model where heterogeneous individuals choose between entering the workforce as unskilled labor or pursuing education to become skilled. In the decentralized economy, monopolists produce goods using both labor types. They purchase...

We present the first representative international data on firm-level AI use. We survey almost 6,000 CFOs, CEOs, and executives from stratified firm samples across the US, UK, Germany, and Australia. We find four key facts. First, around 70 percent of firms actively use AI, particularly younger,...

We use novel data from a survey of nearly 750 corporate executives to study the effects of artificial intelligence (AI) on productivity and the workforce. We document substantial heterogeneity in AI adoption across firms, with more than half having already invested, though many smaller firms are...