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We document novel facts about the relationship between aggregate growth and firm dynamics using a large set of countries. We argue that firm employment patterns are not necessarily informative about cross-country differences in aggregate growth because they are induced by changes in the productivity of a firm relative to others. In contrast, aggregate growth is linked to average firm-level productivity growth and firm age. We formalize this intuition through a tractable model of endogenous aggregate growth and firm dynamics where firms realize positive returns to investment with some probability. We find that cross-country disparities in this probability can account for two-thirds of the variation in aggregate growth. (JEL D21, D22, E23, O4), I. INTRODUCTION An extensive literature relates differences in the level of development across countries to differences in firm employment and productivity distributions (among them, Hsieh and Klenow 2009; Bartelsman, Haltiwanger, [...]

The tasks workers perform on the job are informative about the direction and the impact of technological change. We harmonize occupational task-content measures between two worker-level surveys, which separately cover developing and developed countries. Developing countries use routine-cognitive tasks and routine-manual tasks more intensively than developed countries, but less intensively use non-routine analytical tasks and non-routine interpersonal tasks. This is partly because developing countries have more workers in occupations with high routine content and fewer workers in occupations with high non-routine content. More importantly, a given occupation has more routine content and less non-routine content in developing countries than in developed countries. Since 2006, occupations with high non-routine content gained employment relative to those with high routine content in most countries, regardless of their income level or initial task intensity, indicating the global reaches of the technological change that reduces the demand for occupations with high routine content. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We study differences in exposure to factor-biased technical change among occupations by providing the first measures of capital-embodied technical change (CETC) and of the elasticity of substitution between capital and labor at the occupational level. We document sizable occupational heterogeneity in both measures, but quantitatively, it is the heterogeneity in factor substitutability that fuels workers' exposure to CETC. In a general equilibrium model of worker sorting across occupations, CETC accounts for almost all of the observed labor reallocation in the US between 1984 and 2015. Absent occupational heterogeneity in factor substitutability, CETC accounts for only 17 percent of it (JEL I26, J16, J24, J31, O33) [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article argues that accounting for capital-embodied technology greatly increases the importance of capital in explaining cross-country differences in agricultural labor productivity. To do so, we draw on a novel data set of agricultural capital prices. We document that new capital is more expensive in richer countries, both in absolute terms and relative to old capital. A model of endogenous adoption of capital of different quality links these price differences to the path of capital-embodied technology. In particular, our model recovers the level of embodied technology from the price of new capital and the growth rate of embodied technology from the price of new capital relative to old capital. We then measure the stocks of quality-adjusted capital in agriculture for a sample of 16 countries at different stages of development. We find that adjusting for differences in quality almost doubles the importance of capital in accounting for cross-country differences in agricultural labor productivity: from 21% to 37%. In addition, improvements in capital quality have been an important source of agricultural labor productivity growth over the past 25 years, accounting for 21% and 35% of the productivity growth in poor and rich countries, respectively. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Forecasts are a central component of policymaking; the Federal Reserve's forecasts are published in a document called the Greenbook. Previous studies of the Greenbook's inflation forecasts have found them to be rationalizable but asymmetric if considering particular subperiods, for example, before and after the Volcker appointment. In these papers, forecasts are analyzed in isolation, assuming policymakers value them independently. We analyze the Greenbook forecasts in a framework in which the forecast errors for different variables are allowed to interact. We find that allowing the losses to interact makes the unemployment forecasts virtually symmetric, the output forecasts symmetric prior to the Volcker appointment, and the inflation forecasts symmetric after the onset of the Great Moderation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]