We introduce public capital and public services as inputs in an endogenous growth model. We show that the growth rate depends on the apportionment of tax revenues between the accumulation of public capital and the provision of public services. When public spending is financed by proportional...

We characterize optimal economic growth in an endogenous growth model in which production requires public capital (a stock) and public services (a flow) in addition to private capital and labor. We analyze the comparative static effects of changes in the fundamental technological and preference...

Several leading undergraduate intermediate macroeconomics textbooks now include a simple reduced-form New Keynesian model of short-run dynamics (alongside the IS-LM model). Unfortunately, there is no accompanying description of how the zero lower bound on nominal interest rates affects the...

This paper presents a model of international trade in goods that are ranked by quality. The model differs from existing theories of trade under vertical product differentiation in several ways. The main difference is in the way quality is modeled. But this paper also has different positive...

In this endogenous growth model, a minimum efficient scale of production and workers' home-to-work travel costs combine to give firms monopsony power, and this monopsony power leads to slower growth. Monopsony drives the wage below the marginal product of labor. This lower wage leads to lower...

I discuss a generalized Heckscher-Ohlin-Vanek (HOV) model in which consumption requires time as well as money (as in Becker's theory of the allocation of time) and the amount of work that a worker can do per unit of time-her "ability"-varies from country to country. High ability implies high...

This paper demonstrates, for a two-good, two-country model with finitely-lived agents, the possibility of using national debt as a policy instrument to improve welfare via an improvement in the terms of trade. The latter is large enough to outweigh the negative effect of crowding out of capital...

The role of fiscal policy is examined when public goods provide both productive and utility services. In the presence of congestion, the consumption tax is shown to be distortionary. Optimal fiscal policy involves using consumption-based instruments in conjunction with the income tax. An income...