How important was international immigration for the U.S. and its demography during the nineteenth century? This paper investigates, quantitatively, its effect on the westward movement of population and the regional and secular changes in fertility. Beside immigration, two alternative forces are...

Consider the following facts. In 1950, the richest countries attained an average of 8 years of schooling whereas the poorest countries 1.3 years, a large 6-fold difference. By 2005, the difference in schooling declined to 2-fold because schooling increased faster in poor than in rich countries....

We develop a model of costly technology adoption where the cost is irrecoverable and fixed. Households must decide when to switch from an existing technology to a new, more productive tecnology. Using a recursive approach, we show that there is a unique threshold level of whealth above which...

We address three questions in this paper. First, what is the impact on growth of changes in flat-rate taxes when government spending on education affects private decisions to accumulate human capital? Second, are the growth effects negligible when we simultaneously change taxes and government...

A widely cited failing of real business cycle models is their inability to account for the cyclical patterns of ?nancial variables. Perhaps less well known is the fact that the return to capital and equity are identical in the neoclassical growth model. This paper constructs a measure of the...