Economic Growth

Stephie Fried

This paper develops a macro heterogeneous-agent model to quantify the distributional welfare impacts of higher temperatures from climate change across income groups in the United States. The …

Lena Gerling · Arzu Kibris

This paper asks how individual-level exposure to internal armed conflict shapes social capital, specifically trust in institutions and trust in people. The question matters because trust is a core …

Kjetil Storesletten · Bo Zhao · Fabrizio Zilibotti

This paper asks why the nature of business cycles changes systematically as economies develop and shed their large agricultural sectors. The motivation is both empirical and theoretical.

Réka Juhász · Shogo Sakabe · David E Weinstein

Research question and motivation: Why did the First Industrial Revolution (IR) spread to Meiji Japan—and to essentially no other non-Western country—during the first wave of globalization? The paper …

Lucas Corrêa-Dias · Jordan J Norris · Heitor S Pellegrina

Food production accounts for roughly one-third of global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, and richer nations contribute disproportionately through meat-intensive diets and input-intensive farming. This …

Stephen Ayerst · Loren Brandt · Diego Restuccia

This paper asks how institutional distortions to factor markets affect not only the static allocation of inputs across farms but also the dynamic choices — crop selection and productivity-enhancing …

Philipp Hochmuth · Per Krusell · Kurt Mitman

This paper investigates how the EU's Fit-for-55 climate package will affect aggregate output and distribute its costs across the income distribution. The question matters because energy is a necessity …

Eugene Tan

This paper investigates how the illiquidity of entrepreneurial capital shapes investment dynamics and wealth inequality. The central question is whether entrepreneurship drives wealth heterogeneity or …

Ia Vardishvili

US cohorts of establishments born in recessions persistently employ fewer workers at entry and over their life cycle, yet are on average more productive than expansionary cohorts; the number of …

Eric Jondeau · Gregory Levieuge · Jean-Guillaume Sahuc · Gauthier Vermandel

This paper asks whether public subsidies to green-technology producers, financed by a carbon tax, can materially reduce the macroeconomic cost of reaching net-zero CO2 emissions by 2060. The …

Ruixue Jia · Xiao Ma · Victoria Wenxin Xie

This paper studies how the expectation of rising flood risk — distinct from realized flood events — reshapes where firms locate, where workers live and how much they work, and what this implies for …

Tristany Armangué-Jubert · Tancredi Rapone · Alessandro Ruggieri

Firms are larger and grow faster over the life cycle in high-income countries, while labor markets in poorer countries are less competitive (employers hold more wage-setting power). The paper asks how …

Alessandro Ferrari · Francisco Queirós

Ferrari and Queirós ask why US recoveries have become progressively slower and argue that rising firm heterogeneity and market power — well-documented long-run trends — can substantially increase the …

Hiroshi Inokuma · Juan M. Sánchez

This paper asks how the well-documented slowdown in labor-force growth affects aggregate total factor productivity (TFP) growth, a question that prior work on business dynamism had left unanswered. …

Hyejoon Im · John McLaren

Im and McLaren (2025) ask whether globalization induces governments to weaken labor standards for workers — the so-called "race to the bottom" (RTB) hypothesis. The question has high stakes: advocates …

Nick Pretnar · Maria Feldman

The paper investigates why the U.S. health-services sector has simultaneously experienced a tripling of relative prices since 1948 and a rise in the personal consumption expenditure (PCE) share from …

Flavien Moreau · Ludovic Panon

Moreau and Panon ask how much cartels cost the aggregate economy — in terms of both total factor productivity and welfare — and find the losses are considerably larger than the received wisdom from …

Giorgio Chiovelli · Stelios Michalopoulos · Elias Papaioannou · Tanner Regan

Satellite nighttime lights (luminosity) are the dominant remote-sensing proxy for local economic conditions in low-income countries, yet their accuracy at fine spatial scales and over time has …

Holger Breinlich · Elsa Leromain · Dennis Novy · Thomas Sampson

Research question and motivation. How does import liberalization affect a country's export performance and welfare?

Benjamin Bridgman · Berthold Herrendorf

The paper asks why the U.S. labor share has declined over the postwar period, and whether rising markups or capital deepening (automation, falling capital prices) is the primary driver. The authors …

Sebastian Ellingsen

This paper asks whether the location of economic activity adapts to changes in the location of trading opportunities, or whether historical patterns of trade permanently fix where cities emerge and …

Junichi Fujimoto · David Lagakos · Mitchell VanVuren

This paper asks whether publicly funded ("free") secondary schooling in developing countries raises GDP per capita. The question is policy-relevant because many low-income countries — including Ghana, …

Vincenzo De Lipsis · Matteo Deleidi · Mariana Mazzucato · Paolo Agnolucci

This paper estimates the dynamic macroeconomic effects of US government R&D investment using a Structural Vector Autoregressive (SVAR) framework, with an extension to a Rational Expectations SVAR …

Ariel Karlinsky · Moses Shayo

Karlinsky and Shayo ask which governments manipulate public information, in which direction, and by how much — questions that are normally intractable because the ground truth is unobservable. The …

Barton H. Hamilton · Andrés Hincapié · Emma C. Kalish · Nicholas W. Papageorge

This paper asks why medical innovation can widen health disparities even when it unambiguously improves health for everyone who takes it. The authors argue that the standard access-versus-preferences …

Vahagn Jerbashian

This paper estimates the elasticities of substitution between labor, information and communication technology (ICT) and intellectual property (IP) capital, and traditional capital using a nested …

Davin Chor · Edwin L.-C. Lai

This paper develops a tractable general equilibrium model of endogenous growth driven by cumulative innovation, and uses it to characterize optimal patent policy — both for patent breadth (via a …

Thomas Douenne · Albert Jan Hummel · Marcelo Pedroni

This paper asks whether inequality and redistributive taxation should make climate policy more or less ambitious, and how optimal carbon taxes interact with optimal income taxes when households differ …

Mohamad Adhami · Mark Bils · Charles I. Jones · Peter J. Klenow

The paper asks how much economic progress looks different when one applies a total utilitarian welfare criterion — counting every person's flow utility — rather than the standard per-capita …

Weizheng Lai · Lixin Colin Xu · Li Yang

Research question and motivation: How do civil wars affect long-term development, and through which institutional mechanisms? The paper studies the Taiping Rebellion (1850-1864) in Qing China, one of …

Ferdinando Monte · Charly Porcher · Esteban Rossi-Hansberg

Monte, Porcher, and Rossi-Hansberg ask why remote work surged abruptly and permanently after COVID-19 despite information-technology advances raising it only marginally between 1980 and 2019, why the …

Yuriy Gorodnichenko · Debora Revoltella · Jan Svejnar · Christoph T. Weiss

This paper investigates why firms in the European Union exhibit wide dispersion in marginal revenue products (MRP) of capital and labor — a direct indicator of resource misallocation — and asks how …

Martin Shu

This paper asks whether worker self-selection, rather than slow technological progress, can explain the low measured labor productivity growth in the U.S. service sector — a phenomenon known as …

Sjak Smulders · Sophie Zhou

This paper by Smulders and Zhou challenges the standard lock-in narrative for the slow green transition. The conventional explanation — path dependency in directed technical change (DTC) — is hard to …

Loren Brandt · Ruochen Dai · Gueorgui Kambourov · Kjetil Storesletten · Xiaobo Zhang

This paper studies entrepreneurship and new firm creation in China through the lens of serial entrepreneurs (SEs) — individuals who establish more than one firm — contrasting them with non-serial …

Esther Ann Bøler · Andreas Moxnes · Karen Helene Ulltveit-Moe

Firms that invest heavily in intangible assets — patents, R&D, software — face a structural financing disadvantage: intangibles offer limited collateral value to banks, so intangible-intensive firms …

Hans A. Holter · Serhiy Stepanchuk · Yicheng Wang

This paper investigates how the level and progressivity of personal income taxes shape entrepreneurial activity in the United States, contributing empirical evidence, theoretical intuition, and a …

Robert J Barro · V V Chari

Barro and Chari (2024) revisit the long-standing debate over optimal capital income taxation, unifying the Chamley-Judd zero-tax result, the Straub-Werning positive-tax amendment, and the …

Xavier Cirera · Diego Comin · Marcio Cruz

Research question and motivation: How sophisticated are the technologies establishments actually use, and how close are they to the world frontier? Traditional measures (since Ryan-Gross 1943 and …

Jean-Félix Brouillette

Women accounted for only 3% of U.S. inventors in 1976 and still just 14% in 2023, a pace of convergence far slower than in law (3% to 49%) or medicine (6% to 46%) over the same period. Under the …

Hideki Nakamura · Masakatsu Nakamura · Shota Moriwaki

This paper asks a foundational question: can the economy-wide degree of automation be measured coherently from standard macroeconomic data, without relying on technology-specific proxies such as robot …

Julián Costas-Fernández · José-Alberto Guerra · Myra Mohnen

This paper asks whether proximity to transport infrastructure can sever the occupational tie between parents and children — a question with direct bearing on the debate over place-based versus …

Sarah Sander

This paper estimates the causal effects of universal daycare access on mothers' labor force participation, full-time employment, hours worked, and earnings across 34 years after the birth of their …

Titan Alon · Damien Capelle · Kazushige Matsuda

This paper proposes that university R&D is determined endogenously by competition for tuition and talented students in the market for higher education, and asks why universities fund research …

Daan Opschoor · Dick van Dijk · Philip Hans Franses

Research question and motivation. Since the Great Recession, quantifying downside risks to economic activity (rather than only expected outcomes) has become central for policymakers and investors.

Christoph Hambel · Frederick van der Ploeg

Research question and motivation: Central bankers, regulators, and investors increasingly worry about climate "transition risks" — abrupt shifts in climate policy, green technology breakthroughs, or …

Masami Imai · Michiru Sawada

Why do financial crises leave such deep and protracted economic wounds, with crisis-stricken economies failing to revert to pre-crisis growth trends even a decade later? Imai and Sawada test one …

N. Gregory Mankiw · David Romer · David N. Weil

This 1992 Quarterly Journal of Economics paper by Mankiw, Romer, and Weil tests whether Robert Solow's (1956) neoclassical growth model, augmented to include accumulation of human as well as physical …

Robert M. Solow

Robert Solow's 1956 paper argues that the Harrod-Domar model's famous conclusion -- that steady economic growth is only ever balanced on a "knife-edge," liable to tip into growing unemployment or …

F. P. Ramsey

Frank Ramsey's 1928 paper asks how much of its income a nation ought to save, and derives a rule -- that the rate of saving times the marginal utility of consumption should equal the gap between …

Maryam Farboodi · Laura Veldkamp

The paper builds a tractable dynamic general-equilibrium model in which data is information that firms accumulate to forecast a moving target, is generated as a by-product of production, is tradeable …

Daria Finocchiaro · Philippe Weil

Finocchiaro and Weil ask whether financial development necessarily promotes long-run economic growth, or whether congestion externalities in R&D markets can offset — and even reverse — the growth …

Gaurav Khanna · Emir Murathanoglu · Caroline Theoharides · Dean Yang

This paper asks how persistent increases in international migrant income prospects affect long-run economic development in migrant-origin areas. The central question is whether Philippine provinces …

Andrea Matranga · Timur Natkhov

This paper investigates the origins of serfdom in early modern Russia, arguing that the institution consolidated primarily through political economy dynamics between the crown and a landholding …

Ping Wang · Tsz-Nga Wong

Wang and Wong develop a continuous-time labor-search model to assess the dynamic effects of generative AI (GenAI) on labor productivity and unemployment. The paper is motivated by conflicting …

Bruno Pellegrino · Enrico Spolaore · Romain Wacziarg

Why do observed international investment positions and cross-country differences in rates of return to capital fail to conform to a frictionless capital-market benchmark? The paper asks how large the …

Anna Tompsett

This paper measures the causal effects of land transport infrastructure on economic activity, exploiting quasi-experimental variation in bridge construction over the Mississippi and Ohio Rivers in the …

Peter Blair Henry

The literature's standard finding -- that countries with open capital accounts do not grow faster -- tests a prediction the neoclassical growth model never makes, because in that model liberalization …

Pierre-Olivier Gourinchas · Olivier Jeanne

The textbook neoclassical growth model says countries whose productivity is catching up should invest more and import more capital. Across 68 developing countries over 1980-2000 the cross-country …

Matti Liski · François Salanié

This paper develops a general model of experimentation under catastrophe risk in which the catastrophe is triggered when a stock variable exceeds an unknown threshold, but occurs only after a …

Giorgio Chiovelli · Stelios Michalopoulos · Elias Papaioannou · Sandra Sequeira

This paper examines the impact of conflict-driven forced displacement on human capital accumulation using the Mozambican civil war (1977–1992) as the empirical setting. During this war, over four …

J. Carter Braxton

This comment, written by J. Carter Braxton (University of Wisconsin), discusses the paper "Artificial Intelligence and Technological Unemployment" by Wang and Wong (2025), which develops and …

Andrea Chiavari

This paper asks how rising returns to scale in production contributed to three concurrent U.S. secular trends since 1980: declining business dynamism, rising markups, and growing firm expenditures on …

Marek Ignaszak · Petr Sedláček

This paper asks whether firm-level customer acquisition — distinct from productivity differences — is a quantitatively important driver of aggregate economic growth, and whether ignoring it distorts …

Adrien Auclert · Hannes Malmberg · Frédéric Martenet · Matthew Rognlie

A popular argument — the "asset market meltdown" of the 1990s, revived as the "great demographic reversal" — holds that once the old start running down their savings, aging will push interest rates …

Amory Gethin

This paper constructs the first estimates of the aggregate and distributional effects of worldwide educational expansion since 1980 by developing a "distributional growth accounting" framework that …

Anusha Chari · Peter Blair Henry · Racha Moussa

In a calibrated neo-classical growth model, moving from financial autarky to integration raises consumption most in the first years after opening, so the standard infinite-horizon Hicksian welfare …

Thomas Herndon · M. Ash · Robert Pollin

A critical replication of Reinhart and Rogoff's "Growth in a Time of Debt" using their own working spreadsheet, which identifies three separate problems -- an unexplained exclusion of early post-war …

Trevor W. Swan

Trevor Swan's 1956 paper illustrates, with two diagrams, the connexion between capital accumulation and the growth of the productive labour force in a one-sector economy, then devotes a long appendix …

Paul M. Romer

This 1990 Journal of Political Economy paper by Paul Romer models long-run growth as driven by technological change that arises from intentional research investment by profit-maximizing firms, …

Ali Almelhem · Murat Iyigun · Austin Kennedy · Jared Rubin

This paper tests Joel Mokyr's claim that Britain's industrialization was preceded and enabled by a cultural shift — specifically, that Enlightenment ideals produced a "progress-oriented" view of …

Timothy Besley · Christopher Dann · Sacha Dray

This paper investigates whether individuals who have experienced stronger GDP growth over their lifetimes are more likely to trust their national government. The authors — Besley, Dann, and Dray — …

Carmen M Reinhart · Kenneth S Rogoff

Sorting about 3,700 annual observations from 44 countries over roughly two centuries into four debt-to-GDP buckets, the authors find little relationship between public debt and growth below 90 percent …

Karam Jo · Seula Kim

Jo and Kim ask two related questions: (1) How do firms use different types of innovation when learning others' technology takes time? (2) How does this process alter the aggregate implications of firm …

Paul M. Romer

This 1986 Journal of Political Economy paper by Paul Romer builds a fully specified competitive-equilibrium model of long-run growth in which knowledge is an input to production with increasing …

Esther Duflo · Pascaline Dupas · Elizabeth Spelke · Mark Walsh

This paper provides experimental evidence on the intergenerational impacts of secondary education subsidies in a low-income context, leveraging a randomized controlled trial (RCT) conducted in rural …

Abu Siddique · Michael Vlassopoulos · Yves Zenou

This paper investigates whether virtual contact — exposure to an outgroup through a documentary film — can promote interethnic harmony, and whether targeting network-central individuals amplifies …

Mirko Abbritti · Sebastian Weber

This paper develops a two-country currency union DSGE model with endogenous TFP growth and product and labor market frictions to assess how cross-country differences in market regulation affect …

Gabriel Kreindler · Arya Gaduh · Tilman Graff · Rema Hanna · Benjamin A. Olken

This paper studies how commuter preferences over wait times, travel times, and transfers should shape the design of urban bus networks, using the world's largest Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) system — …

David Cass

David Cass's 1965 paper elaborates Frank Ramsey's 1928 optimum-saving problem inside Robert Solow's aggregative growth model, showing that maximizing the discounted stream of utility from per-capita …

Yves Achdou · Francisco J. Buera · Jean-Michel Lasry · Pierre-Louis Lions · Benjamin Moll

Written explicitly to get mathematicians interested in macroeconomics, this review collects the systems of coupled nonlinear partial differential equations that arise once a macro model tracks a whole …

Fabio Bertolotti

This paper examines how anticipated changes in patent term affect R&D and innovation, using the U.S. ratification of the Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPs) agreement in 1995 …

Kazuo Mino · Hiroaki Sasaki

This paper asks how population aging changes the distribution of income and wealth, using a continuous-time overlapping-generations model in which persistent growth in per capita income is sustained …

José-Antonio Espín-Sánchez · Salvador Gil-Guirado · Nicholas Ryan

This paper studies rainmaking as an instrumental religious belief. The central research question is: why do people believe that prayer can bring rain, even though it does not work?

Samuel Bazzi · Masyhur Hilmy · Benjamin Marx

This paper studies how Indonesia's Islamic education sector responded to one of the largest state-driven mass schooling expansions in history — the SD INPRES program (Sekolah Dasar Presidential …

Victor Gay · Paula E. Gobbi · Marc Goñi

Gay, Gobbi, and Goñi test Le Play's (1875) hypothesis that the French Revolution contributed to France's early fertility decline by abolishing impartible inheritance. In 1793, a series of decrees …

Mariaflavia Harari · Maisy Wong

This paper estimates the long-term causal effects of the Kampung Improvement Program (KIP), one of the world's largest slum upgrading programs, on urban development in Jakarta, Indonesia. KIP ran from …

Nicola Mastrorocco · Edoardo Teso

Mastrorocco and Teso study how the internal organization of a state evolves during national development, framing state capacity as an organizational — specifically a principal-agent — problem. Using a …

Paul Gaggl · Aspen Gorry · Christian vom Lehn

Gaggl, Gorry, and vom Lehn document that services sectors produce a rising share of output in both of the US production networks they study — the input-output network for intermediate inputs and the …

Nicolas Coeurdacier · Florian Oswald · Marc Teignier

This paper asks how cities grow in the process of structural transformation — specifically, whether urban expansion occurs at the intensive margin (higher density within a fixed area) or the extensive …

Robert M. Solow

Robert Solow's 1957 paper proposes a simple method for separating shifts in the aggregate production function ("technical change," broadly defined) from movements along it caused by capital …

Seda Basihos

Since the mid-1990s computing revolution, advanced economies have shown a cluster of regularities — a decade-long productivity boom followed by a slowdown below trend, a sharply declining labour …

Michela Giorcelli · Bo Li

This paper estimates the causal effect of technology and knowledge transfers on early industrial development using the Sino-Soviet Alliance of the 1950s as a natural experiment. Between 1950 and 1957, …

Michael Wiebe

This paper is a comment on Moretti (2021b), which studied agglomeration effects for innovation by testing whether the size of technology clusters causes patenting. The original paper (M21) used US …

Tanguy Bernard · Stefan Dercon · Kate Orkin · Giulio Schinaia · Alemayehu Seyoum Taffesse

This paper tests whether a light-touch behavioral intervention targeting aspirations can produce persistent economic effects on a poor rural population. The research question is whether changing how …

Andrew Garin · Jonathan Rothbaum

Does government-led construction of large manufacturing plants in previously under-industrialized regions generate long-run improvements in regional economic development and in the lifetime earnings …

Adrien Bilal · Diego R. Känzig

The paper shows that the macroeconomic impact of climate change is an order of magnitude larger than what standard country-level panel estimates suggest. The key identification innovation is to …

Isaac Baley · Andrés Blanco

How does partial capital irreversibility — arising from a wedge between the purchase price and the resale (discounted) price of capital — shape the persistence and amplitude of aggregate capital …

Francesco Caselli · James Feyrer

Backing the marginal product of capital straight out of output, the capital stock and the capital share gives a return in poor countries more than twice that in rich ones -- until two corrections are …

Clare Balboni · Robin Burgess · Benjamin A Olken

This paper studies the economics of illegal tropical forest fires in Indonesia, framed as a modern counterpart to Pigou's canonical externality example of sparks from railway engines. The central …

Natalie Bau · Gaurav Khanna · Corinne Low · Alessandra Voena

This paper asks whether dowry — a transfer from the bride's family to the groom's household upon marriage, prevalent throughout India — enables male migration by providing liquidity that compensates …

Kieu-Trang Nguyen

This paper investigates whether and how a CEO's inherited generalized trust enhances innovation within firms, offering a micro-foundation for the well-documented macro-level relationship between …

Sacha Dray · Camille Landais · Stefanie Stantcheva

Wealth data for the nineteenth-century United States barely exist, and this paper builds them from an unusual source: the paper trail of the General Property Tax, a levy that — unlike land taxes …

Paul Bouscasse · Emi Nakamura · Jón Steinsson

When did sustained productivity growth begin in England? This paper constructs new estimates of the evolution of productivity in England from 1250 to 1870, with the goal of both dating the onset of …

Robert E. Lucas, Jr.

If two countries produce the same good with the same constant-returns technology, diminishing returns imply the poorer one has the higher marginal product of capital -- and on 1988 data, US output per …