Results

CEP discussion paper

Roads to development? Urbanization without growth in Zambia

This study explores the impacts of road improvements in a country characterized by "urbanization without growth". Our analysis reveals that, although road upgrades increase population growth, they do not significantly ad...Read more...

Journal article

Annual Review of Economics:

Industrial Policy and the Great Divergence

We discuss recent work evaluating the role of the government in shaping the economy during the long nineteenth century, a practice we refer to as industrial policy. States deployed a vast variety of different policies ai...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Industrial policy and the great divergence

We discuss recent work evaluating the role of the government in shaping the economy during the long 19th century, a practice we refer to as industrial policy. We show that states deployed a vast variety of different poli...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

The research university, invention and industry: evidence from German history

We examine the role of universities in knowledge production and industrial change using historical evidence. Political shocks led to a profound pro-science shift in German universities around 1800. To study the consequen...Read more...

Journal article

Journal of the European Economic Association:

Organizing Global Supply Chains: Input-Output Linkages and Vertical Integration

We study how the technological importance of inputs—measured by cost shares—is related to the decision to “make” or “buy” that input. Using detailed French international trade data and an instrumental variable approach b...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Schooling, nation building and industrialization: a Gellnerian approach

We model a two-region country where value is created through bilateral production between masses and elites (bourgeois and landowners). Industrialization requires the elites to finance schools and the masses to attend th...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Trade integration, market size and industrialization: evidence from China's national trunk highway system

Large scale transport infrastructure investments connect both large metropolitan centers of production as well as small peripheral regions. Are the resulting trade cost reductions a force for the diffusion of industrial ...Read more...

Journal article

The Quarterly Journal of Economics:

Does management matter? Evidence from India

A long-standing question is whether differences in management practices across firms can explain differences in productivity, especially in developing countries where these spreads appear particularly large. To investiga...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

A Many-Country Model of Industrialization

We draw attention to the role of economic geography in explaining important cross-sectional facts which are difficult to account for in existing models of industrialization. By construction, closed-economy models that st...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Does Management Matter? Evidence from India

A long-standing question in social science is to what extent differences in management cause differences in firm performance. To investigate this we ran a management field experiment on large Indian textile firms. We pro...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Barriers and the Transition to Modern Growth

This paper studies how differences in the size of barriers to capital accumulation can account for differences in long run economic development paths. In this model barriers affect both the beginning date and the pace of...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Educational Attainment, Labour Market Institutions, and the Structure of Production

A key feature of OECD economic growth since the early 1970s has been the secular decline in manufacturing's share of GDP and the secular rise of service sectors. This paper examines the role played by relative prices, t...Read more...