Supplements to Acemoglu's textbook Slides from
Acemoglu's lectures at MIT fall 2011.
Discussion of the colonial origins of comparative development David Albouy: The colonial origins of comparative development: An empirical investigation:
Comment,
AER, 2012, vol. 102 (6), 3059-3076
Response to Albouy's criticism. By Acemoglu, Johnson,
and Robinson,
AER, 2012, vol. 102 (6), 3077-3110.
Current economic policy
Idle workers + Low Interest rates = Time to rebuild infrastructure,
L. H. Summers, The Boston Globe, April 11, 2014.
L. H. Summers, U.S. Economic Prospects: Secular Stagnation,
Hysteresis, and the Zero Lower Bound, Business Economics
49 (2).
NEW: Viktor Slavtchev and Simon
Wiederhold, Does the Technological Content of Government Demand
Matter for Private R&D? Evidence from US States, American
Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, vol. 8 (2): 45–84, 2016.
Abstract: Governments purchase everything from airplanes
to zucchini. This paper investigates the role of the technological
content of government procurement in innovation. In a theoretical
model, we first show that a shift in the composition of public
purchases toward high-tech products translates into higher
economy-wide returns to innovation, leading to an increase in the
aggregate level of private R&D. Using unique data on federal
procurement in US states and performing panel fixed-effects
estimations, we find support for the model’s prediction of a
positive R&D effect of the technological content of government
procurement. Instrumental-variable estimations suggest a causal
interpretation of our findings.
Beyond GDP? Welfare across Countries and Time
See paper by C. I. Jones and P. J. Klenow in American Economic
Review, vol. 6, no. 9, 2016.
Danny Quah, 1996, The
Invisible Hand and the Weightless Economy, Occasional Paper 12, Centre for
Economic Performance, LSE, London, May 1996. Abstract: As
modern economies grow, production and consumption shift towards economic value
that reside in bits and bytes, and away from that embedded in atoms and
molecules. This paper discusses the implications of such changes for the nature
of ongoing growth in advanced economies and for the dynamics of earnings and
income distributions—polarization, inequality—across people within societies.
NEW:Embodied technical change
and balanced growth: Grossman, G., E. Helpman, E. Oberfield, and T. Sampson:
Balanced Growth Despite Uzawa,
CESifo Working
Paper No. 5774, Februar 2016.
Recent Danish research on returns to R&D in the private sector and knowledge spillovers
(in Danish), see the Economic Council.
Joseph Stiglitz on patents:
How intellectual Property Rights Reinforces Inequality,
New York Times,
July 14, 2013.
Comment. Prizes,
not patents, Project Syndicate, March 6, 2007. Medicine for tomorrow: Some
alternative proposals to promote socially beneficial research and development in pharmaceuticals, 2010 (with A. Jayadev),
Journal of
Generic Medicines,vol. 7, 3, 217–226.
Stiglitz and Lin, eds.,
The Industrial Policy Revolution I,IEA
Conference Volume 151-1.
Cozzi, G., and S. Galli, 2014, Sequential R&D and blocking patents in the
dynamics of growth, J. of Economic Growth, vol. 19, 183-219.
A beautiful website for growth economists
(although now not so often updated): Economic
Growth Resources
An easily accessible description of growth accounting in practice:
O'Mahony and Timmer, Output, input and productivity measures at
the industry level: The EU KLEMS database,
Economic Journal, 119, June, 2009, F374-F403.
Perspective on national income and growth accounting, see Nordhaus,
2007, Two centuries of productivity growth in computing,
J.
Econ. History, vol. 67 (1), 128-159.
On growth
accounting vs. causes of growth, see, e.g., Aghion and Howitt
(2007)
here.
Income and wealth distribution (time series, theory,
debate)