Essays on Productivity Change, Growth, and Development

To my parents. Essay 1: To replicate an industrial revolution: from exogenous to endogenous growth In the last quarter of the second millennium many countries experienced, simultane-ously, an industrial revolution (an exponential increase in the income per capita) and a demographic transition (an increase first and a decrease later of the population growth rate). How do we account for these facts? Following Lucas (2002b), I construct an overlapping generations model “from stagnation to growth”, calibrate it, simulate the transition, and compare it with data for England between 1640 and 2000. The model can account fairly well for the joint movement of income per capita and population growth rates, as well as other dimensions of the data. The results emphasize the rel-evance of the costs of investment in human capital (costs of education), and suggest that the process of development can be understood as the passage from exogenous to endogenous growth. In this setting, the main anomaly is that the model generates higher income per capita growth rate during the 18th century than the one observed i