We study the effect of a declining labor force on the incentives to engage in labor-saving technical change and ask how this effect is influenced by institutional characteristics of the pension scheme. When labor is scarcer it becomes more expensive and innovation investments that increase labor...

It has been argued that concave models exhibit less ‘endogeneity of growth’ than models with increasing returns to scale. Here we study a simple model of factor saving technological improvement in a concave framework. Capital can be used either to reproduce itself, or, at some additional...

A trade union whose purpose is to raise wages above the competitive level may foster economic growth if it succeeds in shifting income away from the owners of capital to the workers and if the workers' marginal propensity to save exceeds that of capitalists. We make this point in an overlapping...

We consider the role of capital mobility and international taxation in explaining the observed diversity in long-term income growth rates. Under perfect capital mobility, international differences in taxes will not matter for total growth differentials. Policy differences have a role to play in...

We provide an exploratory quantitive analysis of the role of capital mobility and international taxation in explaining the observed cross-country diversity in the long-run rates of growth of per capita and total incomes as well as the population growth rates. Corroborative evidence is found for...

We study long-run trends in aggregate market hours of work and shifts across economic sectors within the context of balanced aggregate growth. We show that a model of many goods and uneven TFP growth in market and home production can rationalize the observed falling or U-shaped aggregate hours...

This paper models technology adoption as replacing workers by machines, which perform the same job in the production process. The paper shows that such modelling of technology adoption affects significantly the analysis of economic growth. This model can explain large and persistent...

We estimate the effect of the diffusion of photovoltaic (PV) systems on the fraction of votes obtained by the German Green Party. The logistic diffusion of PV systems offers a new identification strategy. We take first differences and instrument adoption rates (i.e. the first difference in the...

We study the lags with which new technologies are adopted across countries, and their long-run penetration rates once they are adopted. Using data from the last two centuries, we document two new facts: there has been convergence in adoption lags between rich and poor countries, while there has...

This paper analyses a set of new scenarios for energy markets in Europe to evaluate the consistency of economic incentives and climate objectives. It focuses in particular on the role of natural gas across a range of climate policy scenarios (including the Copenhagen Pledges and the EU Roadmap)...