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This thesis is about productivity differences. It is widely known, and will be found again to be true here, that cross-country differences in income per worker are enormous. Low investment, low education, long distances, trade barriers, bad institutions .... AII these factors have been put forward in the recent and less recent literature. The consensus among economists has been changing accordingly. The mainstream view today is that efficiency plays a big role. This thesis challenges mono causal theories of economic development. It shows that there is a list of relevant inputs that a country has to accumulate in order climb the productivity ladder, among which the efficiency with which these inputs are used. None of these inputs is by itself a leading cause for cross country productivity differences. Altogether they become a powerful explantation.
Including contributions spanning a variety of theoretical and applied topics in econometrics, this volume of Advances in Econometrics is published in honour of Cheng Hsiao.
Volume I, Wealth and Poverty, addresses domestic or internal development problems.
It is the editor’s distinct privilege to gather this collection of papers that honors Subhal Kumbhakar’s many accomplishments, drawing further attention to the various areas of scholarship that he has touched.
This dissertation consists of three essays that broadly deal with the growth and development of economies across time and space. Chapter one is motivated by the fact that agricultural labor productivity is key for understanding aggregate cross-country income differences. One important proximate cause of low agricultural productivity is the low use of intermediate inputs, such as fertilizers, in developing countries. This paper argues that farmers in poor countries rationally choose to use fewer intermediate inputs because it limits their exposure to large uninsurable risks. I formalize the idea in a dynamic general equilibrium model with incomplete markets, subsistence requirements, and idiosyncratic productivity shocks. Quantitatively, the model accounts for two-thirds of the difference in intermediate input shares between the richest and poorest countries. This has important implications for cross-country productivity. Relative to an identical model with no productivity shocks, the addition of agricultural shocks amplifies per capita GDP differences between the richest and poorest countries by nearly eighty percent. Chapter two deals with the changes in college completion in the United States over time. In particular, this paper develop a dynamic lifecycle model to study the increases in college completion and average IQ of college students in cohorts born from 1900 to 1972. I discipline the model by constructing historical data on real college costs from printed government reports covering this time period. The main finding is that that increases in college completion of 1900 to 1950 birth cohorts are due primarily to changes in college costs, which generate a large endogenous increase in college enrollment. Additionally, evidence is found that supports cohorts born after 1950 underpredicted sharp increases in the college earnings premium they eventually received. Combined with increasing college costs during this time period, this generates a slowdown in college completion, consistent with empirical evidence for cohorts born after 1950. Lastly, the rise in average college student IQ cannot be accounted for without a decrease in the variance of ability signals. This is attributed the increased precision of ability signals primarily to the rise of standardized testing. Chapter three again deals with cross-country income differences. In particular, it is concerned with the fact that cross-country income differences are primarily accounted for by total factor productivity (TFP) differences. Motivated by cross-country empirical evidence, this paper investigates the importance individuals who operate their own firms because of a lack of other job opportunities (need-based entrepreneurs). I develop a dynamic general equilibrium labor search model with with entrepreneurship to rationalize this misallocation across occupations and assess its role for understanding cross-country income differences. Developing countries are assumed to have tighter collateral constraints on entrepreneurs and lower unemployment benefits. Because these need-based entrepreneurs actually have a comparative advantage as workers, they operate smaller and less productive firms, lowering aggregate TFP in developing countries.
In recent years, globalization and the expansion of information technologies have reshaped managerial practices, forcing multinational firms to adjust business practices to different environments and domestic companies to adjust to their foreign competitors. In International Differences in the Business Practices and Productivity of Firms, a distinguished group of contributors examines the phenomenon of widespread differences in managerial practices across firms, establishments within firms, and countries. This volume brings together eight studies that combine qualitative and quantitative insider analysis of business practices such as the use of teams, incentive pay, lean manufacturing, and quality control, revealing the elements that determine which practices are adopted and why. International Differences in the Business Practices and Productivity of Firms offers a much-needed model for measuring the productivity and performance of international firms in a fast-paced global economy.
Why are some countries much more prosperous than others? This book argues that differences in average labor productivity, patterns of structural change, and labor misallocation across sectors explain most of the observed differences in economic prosperity around the world. Using a quantitative (calibration) approach, it first shows that cross-country differences in per-capita income are mostly explained by cross-country differences in labor productivity. Moreover, the dynamics of the world income distribution are largely consistent with those of the world productivity distribution. Next, based on recently updated data sources, it reexamines the relative contribution of the proximate determinants of labor productivity: physical capital, human capital, and aggregate efficiency. Finally, taking the structural change patterns of Latin America and East Asia as an example, it shows how labor misallocation across sectors generates large losses in aggregate efficiency and economy-wide productivity. Over time, workers in Latin America keep gravitating to sectors in which the scale of production is minuscule, mostly non-tradable, and hardly standardizable.