This paper estimates the social returns to investments in innovation. The disparate spillovers associated with innovation, including imitation, business stealing, and intertemporal spillovers, have made calculations of the social returns difficult. Here we provide an economy-wide calculation...

This paper estimates the social returns to investments in innovation. The disparate spillovers associated with innovation, including imitation, business stealing, and intertemporal spillovers, have made calculations of the social returns difficult. Here we provide an economy-wide calculation...

One of the central questions in macroeconomics for many years has been whether government policy can affect private saving rates, and if so to what extent and through what channels. The question has remained controversial because, as with other macroeconomic questions, experiments to check...

This paper considers the problem of optimal long run monetary policy. It shows that optimal inflation policy involves trading off two quite different considerations. First, increases in the rate of inflation tax the holding of many balances, leading to a deadweight loss as excessive resources...

Policymaking for posterity involves current decisions with distant consequences. Contrary to conventional prescriptions, we conclude that the greater wealth of future generations may strengthen the case for preserving environmental amenities; lower discount rates should be applied to the far...

The recent European experience of high persistent unemployment has led to the development of theories of unemployment hysteresis embodying the idea that the equilibrium unemployment rate depends on the history of the actual unemployment rate. This paper summarizes two directions of research on...

This paper re-examines the relationship between population aging and economic growth. We confirm previous research such as Cutler, Poterba, Sheiner, and Summers (1990) and Acemoglu and Restrepo (2017) that show positive correlation between measures of population aging and per-capita output...

Since 1973 median compensation in the United States has diverged starkly from average labor productivity. Since 2000, average compensation has also begun to diverge from labor productivity. These divergences lead to the question: Holding all else equal, to what extent does productivity growth...

Following the crisis of 2008, several central banks engaged in a new experiment by setting negative policy rates. Using aggregate and bank level data, we document that deposit rates stopped responding to policy rates once they went negative and that bank lending rates in some cases increased...