An economy with clean and dirty intermediate inputs may fall into a trap characterized by low environmental quality and low life expectancy, while the others converge to opposite steady states. We propose new strategies towards sustainable growth. They include: (i) taxes (subsidies) imposed on...

In recent contributions, Weizsäcker (2014) and Summers (2014) maintain that mature economies accumulate too much capital. They suggest large and lasting public deficits as a remedy. This paper argues that overaccumulation cannot occur in an economy with land. It presents novel data of aggregate...

The paper contributes to the discussion on whether real interest rates smaller than real growth rates can be taken as evidence of dynamic in- efficiency that calls for scal interventions. A seemingly killing objection points to the presence of land, a non-produced durable asset whose value...

We study the impact of a government spending shock on the distribution of income and wealth between cohorts in a dynamic stochastic Overlapping Generations model with two types of households, Ricardian households and rule-of-thumb consumers. We demonstrate that an unexpected increase in...

This paper provides a technical description of the overlapping generations model used by the Joint Research Centre to analyse tax policy reforms, including in particular pension and demographic issues. The main feature of the EDGE-M3 model lies in its high level of disaggregation and the close...

We employ a new macro-epidemiological agent based model to evaluate the “lives vs livelihoods” trade-off brought to the fore by Covid-19. The disease spreads across the networks of agents’ social and economic contacts and feeds back on the economic dimension of the model through various...

Using national account data, we define corporate balance sheet adjustment episodes as periods during which major increases in non-financial corporations’ net lending/borrowing are experienced. An analysis of such episodes in Germany and Japan, and a more systematic exploration of a sample of...

Government debt and redistributive taxation can help people to smooth consumption when facing uninsurable individual specific risk. I examine the effects that variations in public debt and transfers have on risk sharing, efficiency, and the distribution of resources. I find that risk sharing can...

This paper develops an overlapping-generations model with heterogeneous agents in terms of earning ability and cash-in-advance constraint. It shows that tax policy cannot fully replicate or neutralize the redistributive implications of monetary policy. While who gets the extra money becomes...

This chapter surveys intergenerational altruism in neoclassical growth models. It first examines Barro's approach to intergenerational altruism, whereby successive generations are linked by recursive altruistic preferences. Individuals have an altruistic concern only for their children, who in...