Contributions published at Macroeconomics and Political Economy (Fabrizio Zilibotti)

In recent years, a number of governments and consumer groups in rich countries have tried to discourage the use of child labor in poor countries through measures such as product boycotts and the imposition of international labor standards. The purported objective of such measures is to reduce the incidence of child labor in developing countries and thereby improve children’s welfare. In this paper, we examine the effects of such policies from a political-economy perspective. We show that these types of international action on child labor tend to lower domestic political support within developing countries for banning child labor. Hence, international labor standards and product boycotts may delay the ultimate eradication ofnchild labor.

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Continental Europe has seen a smaller rise in formal female employment compared with the United States or the Nordic countries. Additionally, Continental Europe has a substantially smaller service sector. These facts coincide with job requirements shifting from physical strength to intellectual capacity. Given empirical evidence, this paper develops a model of endogenous technical change, where new 'technologies' can be invented to increase the productivity of brain-inputs. Two inputs, brain and brawn, are combined through CES production functions into services and industrial goods, with the production sector for goods requiring more brawn than brain. Households allocate time to working at home or the labor market, choose consumption of services and goods, and invest in new technologies. The key is households can produce a substitute for market services and women have, on average, less brawn than men, giving them a comparative advantage with respect to staying home and working in the service sector. Therefore, an economy that does not facilitate the movement of women into the labor market, by imposing high taxes, causes service production to remain at home. This reduces technological innovation, pushing an economy into a self-reinforcing loop, where a small service sector feeds back into low total hours worked by women (and men), further depressing the service sector.

China has amassed $2.4 trillion of foreign reserves over the last two decades. This column argues that it is wrong, and even dangerous, to blame this on a manipulation of the exchange rate. Instead it proposes a structural theory emphasising that credit market imperfections require private firms to build up internal savings which have been channelled into foreign bonds.

We discuss a unified theory of directed technological change and technology adoption that can shed light on the causes of persistent productivity differences across countries. In our model, new technologies are designed in advanced countries and diffuse endogenously to less developed countries. Our framework is rich enough to highlight three broad reasons for productivity differences: inappropriate technologies, policy-induced barriers to technology adoption, and within-country misallocations across sectors due to policy distortions. We also discuss the effects of two aspects of globalization, trade in goods and migration, on the wealth of nations through their impact on the direction of technical progress. By doing so, we illustrate some of the equalizing and unequalizing forces of globalization.

Through actions like product boycotts or imposing international labour standards, governments and consumer groups in rich countries put pressure on poor countries to discourage the use of child labour. But the child-labour problem in developing countries shows no sign of abating. Our research suggests that international activism may be partially to blame, because it can thwart regulation of child labour within developing countries.

A key distinction among theories of civil war is between those that are built upon motivation and those that are built upon feasibility. We analyze a comprehensive global sample of civil wars for the period 1965-2004 and subject the results to a range of robustness tests. The data constitute a substantial advance on previous work. We find that variables that are close proxies for feasibility have powerful consequences for the risk of a civil war. Our results substantiate the 'feasibility hypothesis' that where civil war is feasible it will occur without reference to motivation.

This thesis contains several lines of research conducted during my four years at the European University Institute. It consists of three chapters that analyze the link between parental inter-vivos transfers, education and inequality. In the first chapter, "Accounting for the Changing Role of Family Income in Determining College Entry", I present a computable dynamic general equilibrium model with overlapping generations and incomplete markets and I use this model to measure the fraction of households constrained in their college entry decision. College education is financed by family transfers and public subsidies, where transfers are generated through altruism on part of the parents. Parents face a trade-off between making transfers to their children and own savings. Ceteris paribus, parents who expect lower future earnings transfer less and save more. Data from the 1986 Survey of Consumer Finances give support to this mechanism. I show that this trade-off leads to substantially higher estimates of the fraction of constrained households compared to the results in the empirical literature (18 instead of 8 percent). The model also predicts that an increment in parents' earnings uncertainty decreases their willingness to provide transfers. In combination with rising returns to education, which makes college going more attractive, this boosts the number of constrained youths and explains why family income has become more important for college access over the last decades in the U.S. economy. In chapter two, titled "Why Do the Rich Save More: The Role of Housing", I analyze the determinants of the wealth-income gradient with educational attainment that is observable in the data. This gradient is very steep: using the 1989 wave of the Survey of Consumer Finances (SCF), I find the median college graduate near retirement age holds twice as much wealth as the median high school dropout. In this paper, I argue that housing plays an important role for explaining the wealth-income gradient that is observable in the data. The last chapter, "Parental Transfers and Parental Income: Does the Future Matter More Than the Present?" adds to the results that were derived in the first chapter. More precisely, I present a model of parental transfers that is based on the assumption of one sided altruism. I use this model to analytically study the link between parental expectations about their future resources and their present transfer behavior. In the context of my model, I show that parents with brighter earnings prospects are willing to transfer more to their o spring already today, all other things equal.

In this paper we show that the recent model by Gilles Duranton [Duranton, G., 2007. Urban evolutions: The fast, the slow, and the still. American Economic Review 97, 197-221] performs remarkably well in replicating the city size distribution of West Germany, much better than the simple rank-size rule known as Zipf's law. The main mechanism of this theoretical framework is the "churning" of industries across cities. Little is known in urban economics about the determinants of local industry turnover so far. We present an empirical analysis of the excess churning index for West German cities, which describes the strength of intra-city industry reallocations over time. We find that urban growth and industry turnover are not notably correlated: Some, but not all fast-growing cities have notably changed. Secondly, human capital is positively related to growth and turnover, but only among successful cities. Industrial change within unsuccessful cities is driven by the disappearance of old-fashioned and declining sectors such as agriculture or mining. On a more general level our results suggest that the recent model by Duranton is a powerful description of the urban growth process. Still there are some aspects that are not captured by that model, which are at the core of other theories of urban growth.

We study whether the effects on registered manufacturing output of dismantling the License Raj — a system of central controls regulating entry and production activity in this sector — vary across Indian states with different labor market regulations. The effects are found to be unequal across Indian states with different labor market regulations. In particular, following delicensing, industries located in states with pro-employer labor market institutions grew more quickly than those in pro-worker environments.

In the heart of the Great Crisis, amidst great uncertainty and concerns surrounding the future of capitalism, John Maynard Keynes launched his optimistic prophecy that growth and technological change would allow mankind to solve its economic problem within a century. He envisioned a world where people would work much less and be less oppressed by the satisfaction of material needs. He made quantitative statements predicting that "the standard of life in progressive countries one hundred years hence will be between four and eight times as high..." as in his time. And he wrote about worktime that "...a fifteen-hour week may put off the problem for a great while." He also expected the new era to bring about "great changes in the code of morals", such that the new society will "honour those who can teach (us) how to pluck the hour and the day virtuously and well, the delightful people who are capable of taking direct enjoyment in things...." To what extent have his predictions turned out to be accurate? Economic growth indeed resumed during the 1930s, but the conflagration of World War II was soon to come. Yet, after the end of the war, the engine of growth restarted, and the world thereafter underwent an unprecedented transformation. And people today indeed spend a smaller fraction of their lives in work activity. However, there are large differences in both standards of living and attitudes towards work across countries and individuals. In this essay, I assess Keynes’ forecasts from a global perspective. In the first section, I review and discuss the growth experience of the world in the second half of the Twentieth Century. Next, I discuss Keynes’ predictions about working time and leisure. Finally, I conclude.

For many kinds of capital, depreciation rates change systematically with the age of the capital. Consider an example that captures essential aspects of human capital, both regarding its accumulation and its depreciation: a worker obtains knowledge in period 0, then uses this knowledge in production in periods 1 and 2, and thereafter retires. Here, depreciation accelerates: it occurs at a 100% rate after period 2, and at a lower (perhaps zero) rate before that. The present paper analyzes the implications of non-constant depreciation rates for the optimal timing of taxes on capital income. The main finding is that under natural assumptions, the path of tax rates over time must be oscillatory. Oscillatory tax rates are optimal when depreciation rates accelerate with the age of the capital (as in the above example), and provided that the government can commit to the path of future tax rates but cannot apply different tax rates in a given year to different vintages of capital.

The British Industrial Revolution triggered a socioeconomic transformation whereby the landowning aristocracy was replaced by industrial capitalists rising from the middle classes as the economically dominant group. We propose a theory of preference formation under financial-market imperfections that can account for this pattern. Parents shape their children’s preferences in response to economic incentives. Middleclass families in occupations requiring effort, skill, and experience develop patience and work ethic, whereas upper-class families relying on rental income cultivate a refined taste for leisure. These class-specific attitudes, which are rooted in the nature of pre-industrial professions, become key determinants of success once industrialization transforms the economic landscape.

In this paper we show that the recent model by Gilles Duranton [Duranton, G., 2007. Urban evolutions: The fast, the slow, and the still. American Economic Review 97, 197–221] performs remarkably well in replicating the city size distribution of West Germany, much better than the simple rank-size rule known as Zipf's law. The main mechanism of this theoretical framework is the “churning” of industries across cities. Little is known in urban economics about the determinants of local industry turnover so far. We present an empirical analysis of the excess churning index for West German cities, which describes the strength of intra-city industry reallocations over time. We find that urban growth and industry turnover are not notably correlated: Some, but not all fast-growing cities have notably changed. Secondly, human capital is positively related to growth and turnover, but only among successful cities. Industrial change within unsuccessful cities is driven by the disappearance of old-fashioned and declining sectors such as agriculture or mining. On a more general level our results suggest that the recent model by Duranton is a powerful description of the urban growth process. Still there are some aspects that are not captured by that model, which are at the core of other theories of urban growth.

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We discuss the theoretical and empirical foundations of modern economic theories of cultural transmission. The importance of cultural factors in shaping economic and social transformations has been the focus of a long-standing debate in social sciences since the XIXth Century. Neoclassical economics has remained at the marging of this debate. However, there has been a recent surge of interest among economists for cultural factors. The economic models of cultural transmission borrow the main ideas from the anthropological literature, but endogeneize the efforts parents exert to transmit specific cultural variants or preference parameters. We distinguish between paternalistic models where parents use their own values to evaluate their children’s utility, and non-paternalistic or utilitarian models in which parents choose their children’s preferences to maximize the children’s well-being. We discuss recent examples, focusing in particular on corruption, patience, and work ethic.

In this paper, I discuss some recent research in the area of economic growth and development emphasizing the endogenous dynamics of policies and organizational forms in a world characterized by credit-market and labor-market imperfections. I present a simple model of technological convergence featuring an endogenous evolution of contractual arrangements. The key assumption is that economic growth is associated with investments as well as with the adoption and imitation of existing technologies in economies lying far from the technology frontier. In contrast, growth is increasingly driven by innovation as economies approach the technological frontier. The theory predicts that contractual arrangements evolve and adapt spontaneously to the changing needs of technological progress. However, this evolution is neither necessary nor serendipitous. Economies that fail to introduce economic reforms as they advance may become stuck in non-convergence traps. I discuss a number of empirical applications, including the wave of reforms of industrial policy in India in the 1980s and 1990s.