This paper develops a simple model, which shows how economic fluctuations can stimulate growth. It is shown that firms tend to invest more in productivity growth during recessions, since the opportunity cost (in terms of forgone profits) of investing capital or labour resources in technological...

This paper discusses recent theoretical and empirical work on the interactions between growth and business cycles. One may distinguish two very different types of approaches to the problem of the influence of macroeconomic fluctuations on long-run growth. In the first type of approach, which...

This paper reviews the recent literature on the interactions between business cycles and growth. It focuses on the causality from cycles to growth, but also deals to some extent with the reverse causality. It discusses both "Keynesian" and "Schumpeterian" theories of cycles and growth. Copyright...

In this chapter we argue that the endogenous growth model with quality-improving innovations provides a framework for analyzing the determinants of long-run growth and convergence that is versatile, simple and empirically useful. Versatile, as the same framework can be used to analyze how growth...

This paper constructs a theoretical model to study the effects on employment of the introduction of flexible labour contracts (i.e. with low firing costs), which occurred in many European countries in the 1980s, which it then tests on Spanish data. The model predicts that such contracts increase...

This Paper discusses a number of issues in the context of the debate on intellectual property in less developed countries (LDCs). It starts by discussing the consequences of IP enforcement in LDCs for global innovation and welfare in poorer countries. It then considers the costs and benefits of...

This paper develops a model of job creation and job destruction in a growing economy with embodied technical progress, that we use to analyze the political support for employment protection legislations such as the ones that are observed in most European countries. We analyze the possibility of...

In this Paper, I analyse the pros and cons of implementing structural reforms of the labour market in booms versus recessions, in light of considerations of social efficiency, political viability, and macroeconomic fine-tuning. While the optimal timing of a reform depends on the relative...

Economists traditionally tackle normative problems by computing optimal policy, ie the one that maximizes a social welfare function. In practice, however, a succession of marginal changes to a limited number of policy instruments are implemented, until no further improvement is feasible. I call...

This paper derives the conditions under which fitness-reducing alleles can survive in a long-run stationary equilibrium for a trading population, extending the results in Saint-Paul (2002) for arbitrary systems of sexual reproduction.