This paper analyzes the impact of positional preferences, exhibiting conspicuous consumption and conspicuous wealth, on optimal consumption- and income taxes, for an endogenous growth model with public capital. Positional preferences raise the endogenous growth rate if the elasticity of...

This study proposes a model of non-unitary time discounting and examines its welfare implications. A key feature of our model lies in the disparity of time discounting between multiple distinct goods, which induces an individual's preference reversals even though she normally discounts her...

We show that in overlapping generations endogenous growth models with uncertain lifetime, the introduction of government transfers always increases economic growth by crowding out the private annuity market and increasing accidental bequests. In particular, if the government imposes a flat-rate...

This paper investigates household decisions when individual utility depends on a consumption reference level. The desire to ``keep up with the Joneses'' represents one such example. The prior literature shows that, in a Ramsey model, consumption externalities have no impact on steady state...

This paper sets up a dynamic general equilibrium model to study how the composition of technical progress affects the asymptotic speed of convergence. The following questions are addressed: Will endogenizing a fraction of the productivity increases as coming from learning by investing help to...

Despite ‘joy of giving models’ have been extensively examined in the literature, the Ramsey growth model has never been explored under the assumption of a direct preference for bequeathing savings that are reinvested. This assumption implies a Utility function depending on both consumption...

This paper presents a model which takes into account two main factors that have been partially neglected by the economic development literature: the environmental externalities of human activities and agents' heterogeneity in terms of asset endowment and, consequently, in terms of income source...

We develop a three stage game model composed of a regulator and two firms. These firms compete on the same market where they offer the same homogeneous good, and can invest in R&D to lower their emission/output ratio. By means of a tax per-unit of pollution and a subsidy per-unit of R&D level,...