What obstacles prevent the most productive technologies from spreading to less developed economies from the world’s technological frontier? In this paper, we seek to shed light on this question by quantifying the geographic and human barriers to the transmission of technologies. We argue that...

The point of departure for the study of the impact of energy and environmental policies is the neoclassical theory of economic growth formulated by Cass (1965) and Koopmans (1967). The long-run properties of economic growth models are independent of energy and environmental policies. However,...

This paper argues that investment-specific technological progress (ISTP) conventionally identified with the relative price of investment, inevitably correlate with neutral technological progress in heterogeneous production networks. Consequently, the ISTP is an elusive concept to examine the...

This paper studies the optimal long-run public intervention in a two-period OLG model where the probability of surviving the first period and the length of the second period can be influenced by distinct policies. While the optimal size of public intervention depends on the extra-productivity of...

Distortions in private investment due to credit frictions, and in public investment due to corruption and bureaucratic inefficiencies, have both been suggested as important factors in accounting for the cross-country per capita income distribution. We introduce two modifications to the standard...

We develop two models of economic growth with exhaustible natural resources and consumers heterogeneous in time preferences. The first model assumes private ownership of natural resources. In the second model, natural resources are commonly owned and the resource extraction rate is chosen by...

The usage of information technology (IT) towards sustainable economic growth is found to yield three main effects: (1) an efficiency effect, (2) a scale effect, and (3) a capital utilization effect. The first two effects are multiplicative whereas the third effect is additive on aggregate output...

This article uses an endogenous growth model to study how the improvements in financing for innovative start-ups brought by venture capital (VC) affect firm innovation and growth. Partial equilibrium results show how lending contracts change as financing efficiency improves, while general...

We consider two models of economic growth with exhaustible natural resources and agents heterogeneous in their time preferences. In the first model, we assume private ownership of natural resources and show that every competitive equilibrium converges to a balanced-growth equilibrium with the...

Since 1991, survey expectations of long-run output growth for the U.S. relative to the rest of the world exhibit a pattern strikingly similar to that of the U.S. current account, and thus also to global imbalances. We show that this finding can to a large extent be rationalized in a two-region...