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Fields: Economic development,
Macroeconomics, Demography
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Health Technology Adoption and
Long-Run Mortality Decline (Job market paper): Adult mortality rates fell precipitously in
northern Europe from the middle of the
19th century through the beginning of the 20th. In contrast to influential
strands of the growth literature, I argue, first, that mortality, not
fertility, is the important driver of population growth, and, second, that
a good model of mortality decline must allow for increased survival rates
independent of income growth. Here, a life-cycle technology adoption model
permits the spread of an exogenously introduced health technology (germ
theory) whose adoption reduces mortality. My model accounts for over 98% of
the increase in Swedish life-expectancy at age 20 from 1865 to 1925, and
roughly the same proportion of the growth in population over that time period. In a counterfactual experiment with no
income growth, the pattern of technology adoption is quite similar to the
baseline calibration.
Costly
Technology Adoption and the Green Revolution: Evidence from the Green Revolution
indicates that income and wealth inequality increased after the
introduction of new agricultural technologies, with initially wealthier
farmers adopting modern varieties more quickly than less wealthy farmers.
When there is a fixed cost to technology adoption, we demonstrate that
households with initially greater capital will adopt sooner. A household’s
saving rate increases prior to adoption. Using micro-data on farm size
distribution and adoption rates for Colombian coffee growers, the model can
match the fraction of land planted with modern varieties from 1965 to 1997.
Measured total factor productivity increases over time as more households
switch from the old to the new technology.
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Other:
Boom
and Bust in Telecommunications: with E. Couper and A.
Wolman. A transformation of the technological and regulatory
environment for telecommunications precipitated a massive boom in the sector,
beginning in 1997. Market forecasts of the future of telecommunications
became highly uncertain and, as it turned out, highly inaccurate. A
dramatic bust began in 2000. The boom and bust in telecommunications can be
understood only within the context of these technological and regulatory
changes.
Comment
and Extension: On the Policy Preferences of the US Federal Reserve: The Federal Reserve operates under a Taylor rule type loss function,
and the state of the economy is endogenous to the Fed's actions.
Maximum likelihood estimation subject to a constrained state-space
demonstrates that, consistent with Dennis (2006), narrowing the output gap
may not be a significant policy objective for the Fed. Unlike
previous studies, which use potential GDP as measured by the Congressional
Budget Office to determine the output gap, I use the cyclical component of
real GDP from a HP-filter. Furthermore, modeling the Fed as responding
to the gap between the actual unemployment rate and the CBO's
natural rate estimate does not yield meaningful results.
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