Best Selling Books by Daron Acemoglu

For courses in Principles of Macroeconomics Acemoglu, Laibson, List: An evidence-based approach to economics Throughout Macroeconomics, authors Daron Acemoglu, David Laibson, and John List use real economic questions and data to help students learn about the world around them. Taking a fresh approach, the authors use the themes of optimization, equilibrium and empiricism to illustrate the power of simple economic ideas, and their ability to explain, predict, and improve what happens in the world. Each chapter begins with an empirical question that is later answered using data in the Evidence-Based Economics feature. As a result of the text’s practical emphasis, students will learn to apply economic principles to guide the decisions they make in their own lives. MyEconLab is an online homework, tutorial, and assessment product designed to personalize learning and improve results. With a wide range of interactive, engaging, and assignable activities, students are encouraged to actively learn and retain tough course concepts. Please note that the product you are purchasing does not include MyEconLab. MyEconLab Join over 11 million students benefiting from Pearson MyLabs. This title can be supported by MyEconLab, an online homework and tutorial system designed to test and build your understanding. Would you like to use the power of MyEconLab to accelerate your learning? You need both an access card and a course ID to access MyEconLab. These are the steps you need to take: 1. Make sure that your lecturer is already using the system Ask your lecturer before purchasing a MyLab product as you will need a course ID from them before you can gain access to the system. 2. Check whether an access card has been included with the book at a reduced cost If it has, it will be on the inside back cover of the book. 3. If you have a course ID but no access code, you can benefit from MyEconLab at a reduced price by purchasing a pack containing a copy of the book and an access code for MyEconLab (ISBN:9781292080710) 4. If your lecturer is using the MyLab and you would like to purchase the product... Go to www.myeconlab.com to buy access to this interactive study programme. For educator access, contact your Pearson representative. To find out who your Pearson representative is, visit www.pearsoned.co.uk/replocator

This paper revisits the important ideas proposed by Atkinson and Stiglitz's seminal 1969 paper on technological change. After linking these ideas to the induced innovation literature of the 1960s and the more recent directed technological change literature, it explains how these three complementary but different approaches are useful in the study of a range of current research areas though they may also yield different answers to important questions. It concludes by highlighting several important areas where these ideas can be fruitfully applied in future work. Keywords: Biased technological change, directed technological change, localized technological change, innovation, skill-biased technological change, technology. JEL Classification: E25, J31, O30, O31, O33.

Thomas Piketty's (2013) book, Capital in the 21st Century, follows in the tradition of the great classical economists, like Marx and Ricardo, in formulating general laws of capitalism to diagnose and predict the dynamics of inequality. We argue that general economic laws are unhelpful as a guide to understand the past or predict the future, because they ignore the central role of political and economic institutions, as well as the endogenous evolution of technology, in shaping the distribution of resources in society. We use regression evidence to show that the main economic force emphasized in Piketty's book, the gap between the interest rate and the growth rate, does not appear to explain historical patterns of inequality (especially, the share of income accruing to the upper tail of the distribution). We then use the histories of inequality of South Africa and Sweden to illustrate that inequality dynamics cannot be understood without embedding economic factors in the context of economic and political institutions, and also that the focus on the share of top incomes can give a misleading characterization of the true nature of inequality. Keywords: Capitalism, Inequality, Institutions. JEL Classification: P16, P48, O20.

Modernization theory is a cornerstone of much of political science, despite the mounting evidence against its predictions. In this paper, we argue that the theory's failings are rooted in predictions that are not conditioned on history and cultural configurations. We outline a theory in which the interplay of the distribution of political power and cultural configurations lead to three distinct self-reinforcing paths of political development, with very different state-society relations, institutions, and economic structures. These are paths to Despotic, Absent and Shackled leviathans. The role of cultural configurations, made up of attributes in a society's culture set, is critical in legitimizing the social arrangements in each path. For example, a Despotic Leviathan, as in China, cannot be understood without appreciating how Confucian culture has been used to bolster a worldview in which rulers are supposed to be virtuous and regular people are discouraged from political participation. We argued that this interpretation is not inherent to Confucian thought, but has to be understood as an endogenous outcome along the trajectory to the Despotic Leviathan. None of the three different paths we highlight support modernization theory. Under the Absent Leviathan, there is no economic modernization. Under the Despotic Leviathan, economic growth bolsters the existing regime and its supporting cultural configuration, with no tendency towards democracy or associate political changes. Under the Shackled Leviathan, there are dynamics leading to economic growth and political changes with greater bottom-up participation. Nevertheless, the causation does not go from the former to the latter, and these changes are critically dependent on cultural and political entrepreneurship in order to formulate and popularize new cultural configurations and institutionalize political changes.

Health expenditures as a share of GDP have more than tripled over the last half century. A common conjecture is that this is primarily a consequence of rising real per capita income, which more than doubled over the same period. We investigate this hypothesis empirically by instrumenting for local area income with time-series variation in global oil prices between 1970 and 1990 interacted with cross-sectional variation in the oil reserves across different areas of the Southern United States. This strategy enables us to capture both the partial equilibrium and the local general equilibrium effects of an increase in income on health expenditures. Our central estimate is an income elasticity of 0.7, with an elasticity of 1.1 as the upper end of the 95 percent confidence interval. Point estimates from alternative specifications fall on both sides of our central estimate, but are almost always less than 1. We also present evidence suggesting that there are unlikely to be substantial national or global general equilibrium effects of rising income on health spending, for example through induced innovation. Our overall reading of the evidence is that rising income is unlikely to be a major driver of the rising health share of GDP.

This paper proposes a new framework for studying the interplay between culture and institutions. We follow the recent sociology literature and interpret culture as a "repertoire", which allows rich cultural responses to changes in the environment and shifts in political power. Specifically, we start with a culture set, which consists of attributes and the feasible connections between them. Combinations of attributes produce cultural configurations, which provide meaning, interpretation and justification for individual and group actions. Cultural figurations also legitimize and support different institutional arrangements. Culture matters as it shapes the set of feasible cultural figurations and via this channel institutions. Yet, changes in politics and institutions can cause a rewiring of existing attributes, generating very different cultural configurations. Cultural persistence may result from the dynamics of political and economic factors -- rather than being a consequence of an unchanging culture. We distinguish cultures by how fluid they are -- whereby more fluid cultures allow a richer set of cultural configurations. Fluidity in turn depends on how specific (vs. abstract) and entangled (vs. free-standing) attributes in a culture set are. We illustrate these ideas using examples from African, England, China, the Islamic world, the Indian caste system and the Crow. In all cases, our interpretation highlights that culture becomes more of a constraint when it is less fluid (more hardwired), for example because its attributes are more specific or entangled. We also emphasize that less fluid cultures are not necessarily "bad cultures", and may create a range of benefits, though they may reduce the responsiveness of culture to changing circumstances. In many instances, including in the African, Chinese and English cases, we show that there is a lot of fluidity and very different, almost diametrically-opposed, cultural configurations are feasible, often compete with each other for acceptance and can gain the upper hand depending on political factors.

This paper evaluates the importance of "property rights institutions," which protect citizens against expropriation by the government and powerful elites, and "contracting institutions," which enable private contracts between citizens. We exploit exogenous variation in both types of institutions driven by colonial history, and document strong first-stage relationships between property rights institutions and the determinants of European colonization strategy (settler mortality and population density before colonization), and between contracting institutions and the identity of the colonizing power. Using this instrumental variables approach, we find that property rights institutions have a first-order effect on long-run economic growth, investment, and financial development. Contracting institutions appear to matter only for the form of financial intermediation. A possible explanation for this pattern is that individuals often find ways of altering the terms of their formal and informal contracts to avoid the adverse effects of contracting institutions, but are unable to do so against the risk of expropriation. Keywords: Contracts, Economic Growth, Financial Development, Institutions, Law and Finance, Legal Formalism, Legal Origin, Political Economy, Politics, Property Rights. JEL Classification: E44, G18, K00, N20, P16, P17.

(Cont.) Under some additional assumptions on preferences, these results generalize to the case when the government is benevolent but unable to commit to future tax policies. We conclude by providing a brief comparison of centralized mechanisms operated by self-interested rulers to anonymous markets. Keywords: dynamic incentive problems, mechanism design, optimal taxation, political economy, revelation principle. JEL Classifications: H11, H21, E61, P16.

In this essay, we provide a simple conceptual framework to elucidate the forces that lead to institutional persistence and change. Our framework is based on a dynamic game between different groups, who care both about current policies and institutions and future policies, which are themselves determined by current institutional choices, and clarifies the forces that lead to the most extreme form of institutional persistence ("institutional stasis") and the potential drivers of institutional change. We further study the strategic stability of institutions, which arises when institutions persist because of fear of subsequent, less beneficial changes that would follow initial reforms. More importantly, we emphasize that, despite the popularity of ideas based on institutional stasis in the economics and political science literatures, most institutions are in a constant state of flux, but their trajectory may still be shaped by past institutional choices, thus exhibiting "path-dependent change", so that initial conditions determine both the subsequent trajectories of institutions and how they respond to shocks. We conclude the essay by discussing how institutions can be designed to bolster stability, the relationship between social mobility and institutions, and the interplay between culture and institutions.

will be the ruling coalition and conditions under which the most powerful individuals will not be included in the ruling coalition. We also use this framework to discuss endogenous party formation.

External certification of workplace skills obtained through on-the-job training is widespread in many countries. This may indicate that training is financed by workers, and certification serves to assure the quality of the training offered by the firm. However, other evidence shows that general training is financed by firms, especially in Germany. We show in this paper that external certification of training may also be necessary for an equilibrium with firm-sponsored training. Firm financing of training is only possible if firms have monopsony power over the workers after training. If the training firm can extract too much of the employment rents, however, workers may not have sufficient incentives to put forth effort during training. Certification increases the values of training to the outside market, and hence to workers, making firm-sponsored training possible.