Economic Growth and Structural Transformation
Paper Session
Saturday, Jan. 8, 2022 3:45 PM - 5:45 PM (EST)
- Chair: Melissa Dell, Harvard University
European Immigrants and the United States' Rise to the Technological Frontier
Abstract
We study the role of European Immigration on local and aggregate economic growth in the United States between 1880 and 1920. We employ a big data approach and link, at the individual-level, information from the Population Census, the universe of patentsand millions of historical immigration records. We find that immigrants were more prolific innovators than natives, and document large differences in innovation potential across nationalities and regions in the United States. To measure the importance of immigrants for the creation of new ideas and economic growth, we develop a new spatial model of growth through dissemination of knowledge and workers' mobility. The model allows us to use our micro and regional empirical findings to measure immigrants'
innovation human capital and the degree of knowledge diffusion which regulates scale effects. We quantitatively analyze the effects of imposing major immigration restrictions on American economic growth in the 19th and early 20th century. We find large, accumulating, losses from these restrictions. Both the scale effects and the exclusion of high-human capital immigrants contribute significantly to these losses.
Steering Technological Progress
Abstract
Rapid progress in new technologies such as Artificial Intelligence has recently led to widespread anxiety about potential job losses. This paper asks how to guide innovative efforts so as to increase labor demand and create better-paying jobs. We develop a theoretical framework to identify the properties that make an innovation desirable from the perspective of workers, including its technological complementarity to labor, the factor share of labor in producing the goods involved, and the relative income of the affected workers. Examples of labor-friendly innovations are intelligent assistants who enhance the productivity of human workers. The paper discusses measures to steer technological progress in a desirable direction for workers, ranging from nudges for entrepreneurs to changes in tax, labor market and intellectual property policies to direct subsidies and taxes on innovation. In the future, we find that progress should increasingly be steered to provide workers with utility from the non-monetary aspects of their jobs.Tillers of Prosperity: Land Ownership, Reallocation, and Structural Transformation
Abstract
This paper analyzes the impact of a large-scale land ownership reform on the reallocation of capital and labor, and structural transformation. In prewar Japan, labor was abundant and capital was scarce in the agricultural sector. Using a novel dataset, I show that the land reform enforced by the Allies after World War II, which redistributed a large area of farmlands from landlords to tenants and promoted equality, led farmers to use more agricultural machinery and rely less on family labor for production, resulting in an increase in the out-migration of farm children from rural to urban areas and an increase in agricultural income. Then, I quantified the impact of the factor reallocation on the entire economy using a two-sector neoclassical growth model, and found that (a) not only labor reallocation, but also capital reallocation affected economic growth, and (b) the average GDP per capita during the postwar period was 16 percent lower without such reallocation. These results indicate that not only labor, but also capital is an important factor for structural transformation and that the agrarian institution plays a vital role in this process.JEL Classifications
- O1 - Economic Development