Showing papers by "Robert E. Lucas published in 2004"

The Industrial Revolution: past and future

Abstract: \\"We live in a world of staggering and unprecedented income inequality,\\" writes Nobel Laureate Robert Lucas in the 2003 annual report essay. Lucas goes on to use economic history to frame explanations and present possible solutions to this global quandary.

Life Earnings and Rural‐Urban Migration

Abstract: This paper is a theoretical study of rural‐urban migration—urbanization—as it has occurred in many low‐income economies in the postwar period. This process is viewed as a transfer of labor from a traditional, land‐intensive technology to a human capital–intensive technology with an unending potential for growth. The model emphasizes the role of cities as places in which new immigrants can accumulate the skills required by modern production technologies.

Keynote Address to the 2003 HOPE Conference: My Keynesian Education

Abstract: I have mixed feelings about Bob Byrd1 saying he’s looking forward to receiving my papers. He’s probably only going to get them when I’m gone: I don’t seem to be able to give up anything out of my file drawers. But when that does happen, my papers will be in the best library for the history of economic thought they can find anywhere, so they will have a happy home. Well, I’m not here to tell people in this group about the history of monetary thought. I guess I’m here as a kind of witness from a vanished culture, the heyday of Keynesian economics. It’s like historians rushing to interview the last former slaves before they died, or the last of the people who remembered growing up in a Polish shtetl. I am going to tell you what it was like growing up in a day when Keynesian economics was taught as a solid basis on which macroeconomics could proceed. My credentials?Was I a Keynesian myself?Absolutely. And does my Chicago training disqualify me for that? No, not at all. David Laidler [who was present at the conference] will agree with me on this, and I will explain in some detail when I talk about my education. Our Keynesian credentials, if we wanted to claim them, were as good as could be obtained in any graduate school in the country in 1963. I thought when I was trying to prepare some notes for this talk that people attending the conference might be arguing about Axel

Life Earnings and Rural-Urban Migration

Abstract: This paper is a theoretical study of rural-urban migration-urbanization - as it has occurred in many low-income economies in the postwar period. This process is viewed as a transfer of labor from a traditional, land-intensive technology to a human capital-intensive technology with an unending potential for growth. The model emphasizes the role of cities as places in which new immigrants can accumulate the skills required by modern production technologies.

Implications of the Eaton-Kortum Model of International Trade

Abstract: This paper develops a general equilibrium model of world trade, based on the technology proposed by Eaton and Kortum. We study the existence and uniqueness of equilibrium. We propose and test an algorithm for calculating equilibria. We test the ability of a calibrated version of the model to account for trade volumes, and use the theory to simulate the gains from hypothetical trade liberalizations.