Search Results
Working Paper
Uninsured risk, stagnation, and fiscal policy
Japan is in the midst of a protracted spell of depressed economic activity. Japan's economic stagnation has occurred against a background of rising earnings risk. Occupational stability is falling as routine occupations disappear and implicit lifetime employment guarantees are gradually disappearing. At the same time, earnings in some high-skilled occupations have continued to grow. The resulting polarization in earnings has also been accompanied by an increase in wealth inequality. We develop a framework that relates these observations. In our model, an increase in uninsured earnings risk ...
Journal Article
Agricultural Employment and the Economic Transition from Malthus to Solow
We develop a simple model where the final output is produced using two technologies—one with diminishing returns and another with constant returns—and labor as the sole input. We show that the rate of decline in the share of agricultural employment is a sufficient statistic for the onset of economic transition from stagnation to sustained growth. Our quantitative results are consistent with the implications for the evolution of per capita income for economies in various stages of development and structural transformation.