This paper analyzes a model of economic growth that explains differences in economic structure across countries. It highlights the interplay between productivity, talents utilization and entrepreneurship incentives. The paper has two main results. First, it argues that when measuring human capital we ignore one dimension, which is “talents utilization”. It is suggested then that, in development...

We study long-run trends in market hours of work and employment shifts across economic sectors driven by uneven TFP growth in market and home production. We focus on the structural transformation between agriculture, manufacturing and services and on the marketization of home production. The model can rationalize the observed falling or Ushaped pattern for aggregate hours, the shift from agricu...

Among today’s rich economies, per capita output levels diverged before converging to the levels of the frontier economy. Since frontier economies grew at stable rates, non-frontier economies display an S-shaped transition path. Along this transition, there are "catapult effects": longer episodes of stagnation are associated with faster subsequent rates of convergence to the frontier. Many of to...

Here we supplement some earlier work (Beaudry and Portier [2004]) with some new evidence obtained from Japanese and U.S. sectoral data. Our results show that (i) In the U.S. as well as for Japan, Stock Prices short run movements incorporate most (all) of the long run shocks to Total Factor Productivity and (ii) the Stock Price news is indeed a shock that does not affect sectoral TFP s on impact...

We endogenize total factor productivity in a neoclassical model with increasing returns to scale. We obtain multiple steady-state equilibria with an arbitrarily small degree of increasing returns to scale. While the most productive …rms operate across all the steady states, in a poverty trap less productive …rms operate as well. This results in lower average …rm productivity and total factor pr...

Neoclassical economists argue that competition promotes efficiency. They consider technology as given though. In the long run technological progress is an important determinant of the level of welfare and Schumpeter argued that monopoly rents help entrepreneurs to capture the gains of R&D and hence to invest in it. We investigate the overall effect of competition on performance. Performance is ...

The U.K. skill premium fell from the 1950s to the late 1970s and then rose very sharply. This paper examines the contributions to these relative wage movements of international trade and technical change. We first measure trade as changes in product prices and technical change as TFP growth. Then we relate price and TFP changes to a set of underlying factors. Among a number of results, we find ...