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Working Paper
The great housing boom of China
China's housing prices have been growing nearly twice as fast as national income in the past decade despite (1) a phenomenal rate of return to capital and (2) an alarmingly high vacancy rate. This paper interprets such a prolonged paradoxical housing boom as a rational bubble that emerges naturally from China's large-scale economic transition, featuring an exceptionally high rate of return to capital driven by massive resource reallocation. Because such primarily resource-reallocation-driven high capital returns are not sustainable in the long run, expectations of high future demand for ...
Working Paper
The S-curve: Understanding the Dynamics of Worldwide Financial Liberalization
Using a novel database of domestic financial reforms in 90 countries from 1973 to 2014, we document that global financial liberalization followed an S-curve path: reforms were slow and gradual in early periods, accelerated during the 1990s, and slowed down after 2000. We estimate a learning model that explains these dynamics. Policymakers updated their beliefs about the growth effects of financial reforms by learning from their own and other countries' experiences. Positive growth surprises in advanced economies helped accelerate belief updating worldwide, leading to the global wave of ...
Working Paper
Capital goods trade, relative prices, and economic development
International trade in capital goods has quantitatively important effects on economic development through two channels: capital formation and aggregate TFP. We embed a multi country, multi sector Ricardian model of trade into a neoclassical growth framework. Our model matches several trade and development facts within a unified framework: the world distribution of capital goods production and trade, cross-country differences in investment rate and price of final goods, and cross-country equalization of price of capital goods. Reducing barriers to trade capital goods allows poor countries to ...
Working Paper
Capital goods trade and economic development
Almost 80 percent of capital goods production in the world is concentrated in 10 countries. Poor countries import most of their capital goods. We argue that international trade in capital goods has quantitatively important effects on economic development through two channels: (i) capital formation and (ii) aggregate TFP. We embed a multi country, multi sector Ricardian model of trade into a neoclassical growth model. Barriers to trade result in a misallocation of factors both within and across countries. We calibrate the model to bilateral trade flows, prices, and income per worker. Our model ...
Working Paper
Deindustrialization and Industry Polarization
We add to recent evidence on deindustrialization and document a new pattern: increasing industry polarization over time. We assess whether these new features of structural change can be explained by a dynamic open economy model with two primary driving forces, sector-biased productivity growth and sectoral trade integration. We calibrate the model to the same countries used to document our patterns. We find that sector-biased productivity growth is important for deindustrialization by reducing the relative price of manufacturing to services, and sectoral trade integration is important for ...
Working Paper
Household Consumption and Savings over the Life Cycle: The Roles of Demographics and Durables
The canonical prediction of life-cycle models, that individuals smooth consumption over their lifetime, has mostly been tested in developed countries and found little empirical support. We provide a novel developing-country perspective by analyzing patterns of life cycle consumption, income, and savings rates in India. In contrast to the U.S., Indian households exhibit little growth in nondurable consumption expenditures after adjusting for family size. Surprisingly, this flat adjusted profile coexists with substantial income growth and a sharp rise in the savings/surplus rate over the life ...
Working Paper
Human Capital Accumulation Across Space
This paper studies how human capital shapes the economic geography of development. We propose a model in which human capital acquisition costs vary across space, and regions with higher human capital invest more in human-capital-augmenting technology. Locations are interconnected through costly migration and trade. Using data on local income and schooling, we quantify the model at a 1° x 1° resolution globally. Over two centuries, the model mostly predicts persistence in the spatial distribution of development. Proportionally lowering education costs in sub-Saharan Africa raises local ...
Working Paper
Limited enforcement and the organization of production
This paper describes a dynamic, general equilibrium model designed to assess whether contractual imperfections in the form of limited enforcement can account for international differences in the organization of production. In the model, limited enforcement constrains agents to operate establishments below their optimal scale. As a result, economies where contracts are enforced more efficiently tend to be richer and emphasize large scale production. Calibrated simulations of the model reveal that these effects can be large and account for a sizeable part of the observed differences in the size ...
Working Paper
Structural Change in Sub-Saharan Africa: An Open Economy Perspective
We study the evolution of manufacturing value-added shares in 11 sub-Saharan African (SSA) countries through the lens of an open economy model of structural change. Our analysis leverages recent developments in input-output tables in SSA countries. Our model allows for income effects, substitution and relative price effects, and comparative advantage and specialization effects. We calibrate our model to include each SSA country with nine major economies for each year between 2000 and 2018. We do similar calibrations for 11 developing Asian (DA) countries. Our main results are that domestic ...
Working Paper
Structural Change in Sub-Saharan Africa: An Open Economy Perspective
We study the evolution of manufacturing value added shares in 11 sub-Saharan African (SSA) countries through the lens of an open economy model of structural change. Our analysis leverages recent developments in input-output tables in SSA countries. Our model allows for income effects via non-homothetic preferences, substitution and relative price effects, as well as comparative advantage and specialization effects. We calibrate our model to include each SSA country with nine other major economies for each year between 2000 and 2018. We also do a similar set of calibrations for 11 developing ...