We review an emerging application field to parabolic partial differential equations (PDEs), that's economic growth theory. After a short presentation of concrete applications, we highlight the peculiarities of optimal control problems of parabolic PDEs with infinite time horizons. In particular,...

This paper aims at clarifying the conditions under which financial globalization originates welfare gains in a simple endogenous growth setting. We focus on the capital-deepening effect of financial globalization in an open-economy AK model and we show that constrained borrowing triggers...

We consider a small-open, collateral-constrained AK economy. We show that the combination of CARA preferences and uncertainty on capital inflows in such an economy generates long-term (expected) growth while the deterministic counterpart does not. In this framework, long-term growth is entirely...

We study the compatibility of the optimal population size concepts produced by different social welfare functions and egalitarism meant as “equal consumption for all individuals of all generations”. Social welfare functions are parameterized by an altruism parameter generating the Benthamite...

The mechanism stating that longer life implies larger investment in human capital, is premised on the view that individual decision-making governs the relationship between longevity and education. This relationship is revisited here from the perspective of optimal period school life expectancy,...

This paper presents a non-technical overview of the recent investment literature with a special emphasis on the connection between technological progress and the investment decision. First of all, we acknowledge that some dramatic advances have been made in the 1990s in understanding and...

This note studies the stochastic stability of the standard AK growth model under uncertain output technology. Capital accumulation follows a stochastic linear homogenous differential equation. It's shown that exponential balanced paths, which characterize optimal trajectories in the absence of...

The paper addresses the role of education policies for institutional change. Our paradigmatic model consists of an autocratic elite and a mass of hand-to-mouth workers. The elite has full political and economic control. First, it anticipates and can avoid revolutionary threats through income...

We study an optimal AK-like model of capital accumulation and growth in the presence of a negative environmental externality in the tradition of Stokey (1998). Both production and consumption activities generate polluting waste. The economy exerts a recycling effort to reduce the stock of waste....

When cheap fossil energy is polluting and pollutant no longer absorbed beyond a certain concentration, there is a moment when the  introduction of a cleaner renewable energy, although onerous, is optimal with respect to inter-temporal utility. The cleaner technology is adopted either...