Search Results
Journal Article
Currency returns during the financial crisis and great recession
The volume and volatility of international capital flows have motivated recent interest in the optimal use of capital controls and the communication and coordination among central banks.
Why Human Capital Matters Why Human Capital Matters
An economist at the St. Louis Fed discusses the growing importance of human capital in determining a nation’s income.
Learning from Experience: Why Nations May Have Responded Differently to COVID-19
Countries affected by the SARS pandemic in 2002-03 appear to have responded to COVID-19 more quickly and effectively with tests and mobility restrictions.
Working Paper
Of Cities and Slums
The emergence of slums is a common feature in a country's path towards urbanization, structural transformation and development. Based on salient micro and macro evidence of Brazilian labor, housing and education markets, we construct a simple model to examine the conditions for slums to emerge. We then use the model to examine whether slums are barriers or stepping stones for lower skilled households and for the development of the country as a whole. We calibrate our model to explore the dynamic interaction between skill formation, income inequality and structural transformation with the rise ...
Working Paper
Occupation Mobility, Human Capital and the Aggregate Consequences of Task-Biased Innovations
We construct a dynamic general equilibrium model with occupation mobility, human capital accumulation and endogenous assignment of workers to tasks to quantitatively assess the aggregate impact of automation and other task-biased technological innovations. We extend recent quantitative general equilibrium Roy models to a setting with dynamic occupational choices and human capital accumulation. We provide a set of conditions for the problem of workers to be written in recursive form and provide a sharp characterization for the optimal mobility of individual workers and for the aggregate supply ...
Journal Article
Workers Abroad Are Catching Up to U.S. Skill Levels
Although U.S. workers still command a considerable lead with respect to most countries in the world, it is remarkable how strongly other countries have been able to catch up over the past 60 years. From essentially being the sole provider of high-skill workers for both the U.S. and the world economies, U.S. workers must compete, domestically and internationally, in knowledge and skills with workers from many other countries. No matter how tough the challenges brought on by more competition become, American workers?of all education levels?can obtain productive opportunities from knowledge ...
Working Paper
Natural Resources and Global Misallocation
Are production factors allocated efficiently across countries? To differentiate misallocation from factor intensity differences, we provide a new methodology to estimate output shares of natural resources based solely on current rent flows data. With this methodology, we construct a new dataset of estimates for the output shares of natural resources for a large panel of countries. In sharp contrast with Caselli and Feyrer (2007), we find a significant and persistent degree of misallocation of physical capital. We also find a remarkable movement toward efficiency during last 35 years, ...
Journal Article
Shifting Times: The Evolution of the American Workplace
We explore the substantial shifts in the American labor force and workplace over almost 70 years, showing that the identity, education, race and occupations of the average American worker have all been changing. We document big changes in the types of jobs being done by American workers and on the assignment of jobs across workers with different educational levels and other characteristics. Regardless of how much more challenging labor markets become for everyone, the aggregate productivity is higher when the country takes advantage of the talent of all the demographic groups and not just a ...
Working Paper
Openness and the Optimal Taxation of Foreign Know-How
Developing countries frequently offer tax incentives and even subsidize the entry and operation of foreign firms. I examine the optimality of such policies in an economy where growth is driven by entrepreneurial know-how, a skill that is continuously updated on the basis of the productive ideas implemented in the country. Openness allows foreign ideas to disseminate inside a country and can foster the country's domestic accumulation of know- how. With externalities, however, laissez-faire openness is suboptimal and can be growth-and even welfare-reducing. I examine the gains from openness ...
Working Paper
Natural Resources and Global Misallocation
We explore the efficiency in the allocation of physical capital and human capital across countries. The observed marginal products can differ across countries because of differences in technology (i.e. production functions) and in distortions (i.e. differences in use of factors) across countries. To identify differences in technology, we use new data and propose a simple method to estimate output shares of natural resources, and thus adjust the estimated marginal products of physical and human capital. With a sample of 79 countries from 1970 to 2005, we find that the world has decidedly moved ...