This paper considers a setting in which the acquisition of human capital entails a change of location in social space that causes individuals to revise their comparison groups. Skill levels are viewed as occupational groups, and moving up the skill ladder by acquiring additional human capital,...

Studying a one-sector economy populated by finitely many heterogeneous households that are subject to no-borrowing constraints, we confirm a conjecture by Frank P. Ramsey according to which, in the long run, society would be divided into the set of patient households who own the entire capital...

We consider a discrete-time dynamic game in which a nite number of players extract a non-renewable resource and derive consumption solely from the extracted amount (cake-eating game). Markov-perfect Nash equilibria can be constructed in this game not only if the players have time-preference...

We consider situations in which a principal tries to induce an agent to spend e®ort on accumulating a state variable that a®ects the well-being of both parties. The only incentive mechanism that the principal can use is a state-dependent transfer of her own utility to the agent. Formally, the...

We develop a model that incorporates salient features of growth in modern economies. We combine the expanding-variety growth model through horizontal innovations with a hierarchy of basic and applied research. The former extends the knowledge base, while the latter commercializes it. Two-way...

We consider dynamic optimization problems on one-dimensional state spaces. Un- der standard smoothness and convexity assumptions, the optimal solutions are characterized by an optimal policy function h mapping the state space into itself. There exists an extensive literature on the relation...

We study the Ramsey (1928) model under the assumption that households act strategically. We compute the Markov perfect equilib- rium for this model and compare it to the original, competitive equi- librium and to a strategic open-loop equilibrium proposed by Sorger (2002, 2005b). We show that,...