We propose a new theory of the demographic transition based on the evidence that body development during childhood is an important predictor of adult life expectancy. Fertility, childhood development, longevity, education and income growth all result from individual decisions. Parents face a...

We study how economic growth is affected by demographics in an overlapping generations model with a realistic survival law. Individuals optimally chose the dates at which they leave school to enter the labor market and at which they retire. Endoneous growth arises thanks to the accumulation of...

A comprehensive study of the linkages between demographic and economic variables should not only account for vintage specificity but also incorporate the relevant economic and demographic decisions in a complete optimal control set-up. In this paper, a methodological set-up allowing to reach...

Why is R&D spending so low in Spanish firms? One possible answer may lie in a small contribution of innovative investments to value creation at the firm level. When pulling together complementary sources of spending data and related evidence to measure these investments, we observe that R&D is...

The new U.S. data from NIPA contradict some of the well-known Kaldor stylized facts, and call for a reformulation of the modern theory of economic growth. Among these new facts, three must be stressed: A permanent decline in the relative price of durable goods, a permanent increase in the real...

Economists model time as continuous or discrete. The recent literature on continuous time models with delays should help to bridge the gap between these two families of models. In this note, we propose a simple time--to--build model in continuous time, and show that a discrete time version is a...

The main goals of this study are to measure quality improvements in automobile sector in Spain and to estimate the quality bias in car price index released by INE. In order to do that, we propose an alternative methodology to estimate hedonic regressions. This methodology involves classifying...

The aim of this paper is to understand whether international trade may enhance innovation and growth through an increase in competition. We develop a two-country endogenous growth model, both countries producing the same set of goods, with firm speciffic R&D and a continuum of oligopolistic...