One strand of the literature on endogenous growth concerns models in which pub- lic infrastructure a¤ects the private production process. A puzzle in this literature is that observed public investment-to-output ratios for developed economies tend to fall short of theoretical model-based optimal...

Econometric models applied to observed data, specified and estimated using traditional Box-Jenkins techniques, have been widely used to forecast Quarterly National Account (QNA) aggregates. We assess the extent to which an alternative forecasting procedure, based on component models, improves...

Some concepts associated with the notion of public consumption could be considered as wasteful public expenditures, so that a firstbest analysis would set their level equal to zero every period. However, their ratio to output is significant and rather stable over time in actual economies. In an...

This paper analyses the role of macroeconomic performance in shaping the evolution of air pollutants in a panel of European countries from 1990 to 2000. The analysis is addressed in connection with EU environmental regulation and taking into account macroeconomic performance. We start by...

In dynamic settings with public capital, it is common to assume that the government claims a constant fraction of public investment to total output each period, which is clearly a restrictive assumption. The goal of the paper is twofold: first, to find out a more reasonable rule for public...

This paper deals with a polemic and relevant aspect of the economic history of Porfirian Mexico: the integration of agricultural domestic markets. Since corn was the staple product of the commercial agricultural sector and also the main subsistence crop, it is the protagonist of this story....

This paper tackles the fundamental issue in public finance of wether taxing or subsidizing factor rents. In a one sector endogenous growth model with private and public capital, similar to that in Barro (1990),we find that raising taxes on factors’ income as part of an optimal fiscal policy is...

In an infinitely-lived framework, taxing capital income may be growth and welfare enhancing when it allows for correcting distorting externalities in the competitive equilibrium allocation. This is the case when public capital is subject to congestion by private capital or total income [Fisher...

This paper argues that inequality can be both good and bad for growth, depending on what inequality and whose growth. Unequal societies may be holding back one segment of the population while helping another. Similarly, high levels of income inequality may be due to a variety of different...