Extreme events are one of the main channels through which climate and socio- economic systems interact. It is likely that climate change will modify their probability distributions and their consequences. The long-term growth models used in climate change assessments, however, cannot capture the...

This paper addresses the fifty-year decline in growth for the U.S. and other advanced economies. The paper develops a growth model based upon an economy's capital accounts and illustrates how customary growth factors such as labor and total factor productivity are embedded within investment...

When financial regulators require banks to hold a higher ratio of equity capital to debt funding, banks incur short-term costs as they adjust their balance sheets and lose some of the advantages associated with their existing funding mix. They then seek to maintain post-tax income by, for...

Does targeted financial development favor small firms or large ones? And how do resulting changes in the distribution of firm size affect aggregate outcomes? We assess the macroeconomic implications of known stylized facts from the finance literature regarding firm size and financial frictions...

Large and sustained differences in marginal products of capital (MPKs) across countries are sharply at odds with the core implications of the neoclassical framework. Lucas (1990) and many subsequent studies have examined reasons for this MPK differential. In a recent contribution, Caselli and...

We investigate the cost of capital in a model with an agency conflict between inside managers and outside shareholders. Inside ownership reflects the classic tradeoff between incentives and risk diversification, and the severity of agency costs depends on a parameter representing investor...

This paper presents a database of investment and capital in agriculture, an essential input for cross-country macro analysis of the primary sector of the economy. Our work stems from the innovative research undertaken by Larson et al. (2000). With respect to these authors, we extend country...

The taxation of private equity managers' share of funds' profits — the twenty percent “carried interest” — received much attention in academic literature and popular discourse. Much has been said and written about the fact that fund managers' profits are taxed at preferred rates. But...