Timo Boppart

The absence of a trend in hours worked in the postwar United States is an exception: across countries and historically, hours fall steadily by a little below 0.5% per year. Are steadily falling hours consistent with a stable utility function over consumption and leisure under balanced growth of the macroeconomic aggregates? Yes. We fully characterize the class of such functions and thus generalize the well-known “balanced-growth preferences” that demand constant (as opposed to falling) long-run hours. Key to falling hours is an income effect (of steady productivity growth on hours) that slightly outweighs the substitution effect.

For exiting products, statistical agencies often impute inflation from surviving products. This understates growth if creatively-destroyed products improve more than surviving ones. If so, then the market share of surviving products should systematically shrink. Using entering and exiting establishments to proxy for creative destruction, we estimate missing growth in US Census data on non-farm businesses from 1983 to 2013. We find missing growth (i) equaled about one-half a percentage point per year; (ii) arose mostly from hotels and restaurants rather than manufacturing; and (iii) did not accelerate much after 2005, and therefore does not explain the sharp slowdown in growth since then.

In this paper we use the same methodology as Aghion et al. (2017a) to compute missing growth estimates from creative destruction in France. We find that from 2004 to 2015, about 0.5 percentage point of real output growth per year is missed by the statistical office, which is about the same as what was found in the United States. We look at how missing growth varies across French sectors and regions, and we look at the underlying establishment and firm dynamics. In particular we show that the similar missing growth estimates between France and the United States hide noticeable differences in plant dynamics between the two countries.

We propose a new method for computing equilibria in heterogeneous-agent models with aggregate uncertainty. The idea relies on an assumption that linearization offers a good approximation; we share this assumption with existing linearization methods. However, unlike those methods, the approach here does not rely on direct derivation of first-order Taylor terms. It also does not use recursive methods, whereby aggregates and prices would be expressed as linear functions of the state, usually a very high-dimensional object (such as the wealth distribution). Rather, we rely merely on solving nonlinearly for a deterministic transition path: we study the equilibrium response to a single, small “MIT shock” carefully. We then regard this impulse response path as a numerical derivative in sequence space and hence provide our linearized solution directly using this path. The method can easily be extended to the case of many shocks and computation time rises linearly in the number of shocks. We also propose a set of checks on whether linearization is a good approximation. We assert that our method is the simplest and most transparent linearization technique among currently known methods. The key numerical tool required to implement it is value-function iteration, using a very limited set of state variables.

U.S. data reveal three facts: (1) the share of goods in total expenditure declines at a constant rate over time, (2) the price of goods relative to services declines at a constant rate over time, and (3) poor households spend a larger fraction of their budget on goods than do rich households. I provide a macroeconomic model with non‐Gorman preferences that rationalizes these facts, along with the aggregate Kaldor facts. The model is parsimonious and admits an analytical solution. Its functional form allows a decomposition of U.S. structural change into an income and substitution effect. Estimates from micro data show each of these effects to be of roughly equal importance.

During industrialization, Protestants were more literate than Catholics. This paper investigates whether this fact may be led back to the intrinsic motivation of Protestants to read the bible and to what extent other education motives might have been involved as well. We employ a historical data set from Switzerland which allows us to differentiate between different cognitive skills: reading, numeracy, essay writing, and Swiss history. We develop an estimation strategy to examine whether the impact of religious denomination was particularly large with respect to reading capabilities. We find support for this hypothesis. However, we also find evidence which is consistent with the view that Protestants' education motives went beyond acquiring reading skills.

This paper examines under which conditions religious denomination affects public spending on schooling and educational performance. We employ a unique data set which covers, inter alia, information on numerous measures of public school inputs in 169 Swiss districts for the years 1871/72, 1881/82 and 1894/95, marks from pedagogical examinations of conscripts (1875–1903), and results from political referenda to capture conservative or progressive values. Although Catholic districts show on average significantly lower educational performance and spend less on primary schooling than Protestant districts, Catholicism is harmful only in a conservative milieu. We also exploit information on absenteeism of pupils from school to separate provision of schooling from use of schooling.