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 the one of capitalists. We make this point in an...

We scrutinize Thomas Piketty's (2014) theory concerning the relationship between an economy's long-run growth rate, its capital-income ratio, and its factor income distribution put forth in his recent book Capital in the Twenty-First Century. We find that a smaller long-run growth rate may be...

This paper offers a reappraisal of the impact of migration on economic growth for 22 OECD countries between 1986-2006 and relies on a unique data set we compiled that allows us to distinguish net migration of the native- and foreign-born populations by skill level. Specifically, after...

Since the financial crisis in 2008, slow growth has riddled Europe and the Covid-19 pandemic is amplifying the challenge. Promoting economic growth and transforming to a more knowledge-based industrial structure will be high on the agenda for the coming decades. We study how more and better...

Patience affects economic growth, no news. This paper investigates the opposite causal relationship, i.e., how growth influences patience. We propose a simple theoretical framework where heterogeneous parents may choose to transmit their cultural trait - patience - to their offspring. Our model...

We use sizeable lottery prizes in Norwegian administrative panel data to characterize households' marginal propensities to consume (MPCs). Our main contribution is to document how MPCs vary with household characteristics and prize size, and how lottery prizes are spent and saved over time. We...

The empirical effectiveness of economic policies that operate theoretically through similar channels differs substantially. We document this fact by comparing an easy-to-grasp expectations-based policy, unconventional fiscal policy, with a policy whose implications are harder to understand by...

We study the effects of time-using rent-seeking activities on the macroeconomic allocation and the economic growth rate. We formulate a highly stylized three-sector general equilibrium model with overlapping generations of individuals. The production side features one sector producing the...

This article analyzes the effect of population sorting on economic growth. The analysis is performed in a two-region growth model with endogenous fertility, in which public knowledge spillovers from the more advanced core into children’s human capital accumulation function in the periphery are...

Prettner (2019) studies the implications of automation for economic growth and the labor share in a variant of the Solow-Swan model. The aggregate production function allows for two types of capital, traditional and automation capital. Traditional capital and labor are imperfect substitutes...