This paper presents a Schumpeterian quality-ladder model incorporating the impact of new General Purpose Technologies (GPTs). GPTs are breakthrough technologies with a wide range of applications, opening up new innovational complementarities. In contrast to most existing models which focus on...

We present a Schumpterian model of endogenous growth with General Purpose Technologies (GPTs) that captures two important historical stylized facts: First, from the beginning of mankind until today GPTs are arriving at an increasing frequency and, second, all GPTs heavily depended on previous...

We investigate the effect of higher education on the evolution of inequality. In so doing we propose a novel overlapping generations model with three social classes: the rich, the middle class, and the poor. We show that there is an initial phase in which no social class invests in higher...

Environmental pollution adversely affects children’s probability to survive to adulthood, reduces thus parental expenditures on child quality and increases the number of births necessary to achieve a desired family size. We argue that this mechanism will be intensified by economic inequality...

This paper aims at better understanding the inefficiency due to distributional conflicts, which are inherent in every market economy. To this end, we set up a simple general equilibrium model with the following characteristics: two groups of agents (capitalists and workers), an endogenous income...

Motivated by the process of economic development in Eastern Germany since the German reunification we set up a dynamic macroeconomic model of a small open economy where both capital and labor are mobile and there are increasing returns to scale at the aggregate level. The model features multiple...

Motivated by the process of economic development in Eastern Germany since the German reunification we set up a dynamic macroeconomic model of a small open economy where both capital and labor are mobile and there are increasing returns to scale at the aggregate level. The model features multiple...

Even though most countries have agreed to a harmonization of intellectual property rights by signing the Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS), there is still much dispute about the optimal level of protection of intellectual property rights in the world....

While most countries have harmonized intellectual property rights (IPR) legislation, the dispute about the optimal level of IPR-enforcement remains. This paper develops an endogenous growth framework with two open economies satisfying the classical North-South assumptions to study (a)...

What are the dynamic consequences of comprehensive integration shocks? The answer to this question appears all but trivial. We set up a dynamic macroeconomic model of a small open economy where both capital and labor are mobile and there are increasing returns to scale at the aggregate level....