Report
Monopoly rights: a barrier to riches
Parente, Stephen L.; Prescott, Edward C. (1997)
Our thesis is that poor countries are poor because they employee arrangements for which the equilibrium outcomes are characterized by inferior technologies being used, and being used inefficiently. In this paper, we analyze the consequences of one such arrangement. In each industry, the arrangement enables a coalition of factor suppliers to be the monopoly seller of its input services to all firms using a particular production process. We find that the inefficiencies associated with this monopoly arrangement can be large. Whereas other studies have found that inefficiencies induced by ...
Staff Report , Paper 236

Report
Technology adoption and growth
Parente, Stephen L.; Prescott, Edward C. (1991)
Technology change is modeled as the result of decisions of individuals and groups of individuals to adopt more advanced technologies. The structure is calibrated to the U.S. and postwar Japan growth experiences. Using this calibrated structure we explore how large the disparity in the effective tax rates on the returns to adopting technologies must be to account for the huge observed disparity in per capita income across countries. We find that this disparity is not implausibly large.
Staff Report , Paper 136

Report
A unified theory of the evolution of international income levels
Parente, Stephen L.; Prescott, Edward C. (2004)
This essay develops a theory of the evolution of international income levels. In particular, it augments the Hansen-Prescott theory of economic development with the Parente-Prescott theory of relative efficiencies and shows that the unified theory accounts for the evolution of international income levels over the last millennium. The essence of this unified theory is that a country starts to experience sustained increases in its living standard when production efficiency reaches a critical point. Countries reach this critical level of efficiency at different dates not because they have access ...
Staff Report , Paper 333

Journal Article
Household production and development
Wright, Randall; Parente, Stephen L.; Rogerson, Richard (1999-07)
The authors introduce home production into the neoclassical growth model and examine its consequences for development economics. They focus on how well differences in policies that distort capital accumulation explain international income differences. In models with home production, such policies not only reduce capital accumulation, they also change the mix of market and nonmarket activity; therefore, for a given policy differential, these models generate larger differences in output than standard models. The authors show that policy differences? welfare implications (hence the welfare ...
Economic Review , Issue Q III , Pages 21-35

Journal Article
Changes in the wealth of nations
Parente, Stephen L.; Prescott, Edward C. (1993-04)
This study systematically examines the distribution of the wealth of nations and how it has evolved over time. A nation's wealth is measured by its real per-capita gross domestic product. The study documents the following key economic development facts that a theory of economic development must be consistent with: There is a great disparity in wealth between the richest and poorest countries. This disparity has changed little in the postwar period. There was an upward shift in the distribution of the wealth of nations. There has been considerable relative wealth mobility, with some ...
Quarterly Review , Volume 17 , Issue Spr , Pages 3-16