David Lagakos

About

David Lagakos is a professor specializing in macroeconomics and development economics. His research has been published in prominent academic journals such as the American Economic Review, the Journal of Political Economy, and the Quarterly Journal of Economics. He currently serves as a co-editor of the Journal of Political Economy and an associate editor of Econometrica. Since 2016, he has been the lead academic for the International Growth Centre in Ghana, where he helps foster policy-relevant academic research on economic growth. Lagakos is also a research affiliate at the NBER, the CEPR, and BREAD, and he is a co-organizer of the annual NBER conference on Economic Growth. Prior to his current position at Boston University, he was an associate professor with tenure at the University of California San Diego and held previous roles at Arizona State University and the Federal Reserve Banks of Minneapolis and New York. He earned his PhD from UCLA in 2008 and his BA from the University of Rochester in 2001.

Research topics

• Political Science
• Economics
• Sociology
• Economic growth
• Economic geography
• Econometrics
• Statistics
• Macroeconomics
• Geography
• Demographic economics

Selected publications

• The Welfare Effects of Encouraging Rural–Urban Migration

  Econometrica · 2023-01-01 · 83 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  This paper studies the welfare effects of encouraging rural–urban migration in the developing world. To do so, we build and analyze a dynamic general‐equilibrium model of migration that features a rich set of migration motives. We estimate the model to replicate the results of a field experiment that subsidized seasonal migration in rural Bangladesh, leading to significant increases in migration and consumption. We show that the welfare gains from migration subsidies come from providing better i…

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Electricity and Firm Productivity: A General-Equilibrium Approach

  American Economic Journal Macroeconomics · 2023-09-29 · 44 citations

  articleSenior author

  Many policymakers view power outages as a major constraint on firm productivity in developing countries. Yet empirical studies find modest short-run effects of outages on firm performance. This paper builds a dynamic macroeconomic model to study the long-run general-equilibrium effects of power outages on productivity. Outages lower productivity in the model by creating idle resources, depressing the scale of incumbent firms and reducing entry of new firms. Consistent with the empirical literatu…

  PublisherDOI

• Macroeconomic Effects of COVID-19 Across the World Income Distribution

  IMF Economic Review · 2022-08-05 · 32 citations

  articleOpen accessCorresponding
  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Structural change in labor supply and cross-country differences in hours worked

  Journal of Monetary Economics · 2022-05-22 · 24 citations

  articleCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Unemployment and Development

  The Economic Journal · 2023-09-18 · 18 citations

  articleCorresponding

  Abstract We draw on household survey data from countries of all income levels and document that average unemployment rates increase with gross domestic product per capita. This is accounted for almost entirely by low—rather than high—educated workers. We interpret these facts in a model with frictional labour markets, a traditional self-employment sector, skill-biased productivity differences across countries, and unemployment benefits that become more generous with development. A calibrated ver…

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Douglas Gollin

  Tufts University

  106 shared

• Michael Waugh

  Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis

  98 shared

• Alexander Bick

  85 shared

• Nicola Fuchs‐Schündeln

  81 shared

• Martina Kirchberger

  Trinity College Dublin

  53 shared

• Hitoshi Tsujiyama

  University of Surrey

  48 shared

• Benjamin Moll

  32 shared

• Tommaso Porzio

  32 shared

Education

• Ph.D.

  University of California, Los Angeles

  2008

• B.A.

  University of Rochester

  2001

Similar researchers at Boston University

• Benjamin Marxh-90
• Robert G. Kingh-77
• Laurence J. Kotlikoffh-72