Recent literature on financial development and growth has highlighted the possibility of endogenous business cycles arising for particular levels of a given credit multiplier. These studies concentrate on loans directed to the productive activity and neglect the role of credit to consumption. In...

Following Jones and Williams (2000), we assume that R&D is simultaneously subject to positive and to negative external effects (e.g., the non rival nature of technology conflicts with congestion externalities). This observation allows to conceive an economy where two R&D sectors evolve without...

Following the literature on growth, cycles and financial development, this paper develops an endogenous growth model where the source of endogenous business cycles relates to the allocation of credit between productive investment and consumption. An important role is given to consumer sentiment,...

Models dealing with monetary policy are generally based on microfoundations that characterize the behaviour of representative agents (households and firms). To explain the representative consumer behaviour, it is generally assumed a utility function in which the intertemporal elasticity of...

Technological progress produces both positive and negative economy wide externalities. Although positive spillovers seem to prevail most of the times, there is evidence and logical arguments revealing that investment in R&D can exceed the corresponding socially optimal level. Taking on board the...

The standard new Keynesian monetary policy problem is, in its original presentation, a linear model. As a result, only three possibilities are admissible in terms of long term dynamics: the equilibrium may be a stable node, an unstable node or a saddle point. Fixed point stability (a stable...

Two sector growth models, with physical goods and human capital produced under distinct technologies, generally consider a process of knowledge obsolescence / depreciation that is similar to the depreciation process of physical goods. As a consequence, the long term rate of per capita growth of...

Endogenous growth models are generally designed to address long term trends of growth. They explain how the economy converges to or diverges from a balanced growth path and they characterize aggregate behaviour given the optimization problem faced by a representative agent that maximizes...

This note develops a simple macro model where the pattern of wealth accumulation is determined by a credit multiplier and by the way households react to short run fluctuations. In this setup, long term wealth dynamics are eventually characterized by the presence of endogenous cycles.

This paper presents three modified versions of the simple AK endogenous growth model. Such frameworks stress the role of consumers’ sentiment, the impact of fiscal policy and the effect of non-optimal investment decisions made by firms. In all the cases, today’s decisions take into...