The last three decades have witnessed a great deal of research effort devoted to measuring the private output elasticity of public capital. The wide range of available estimates have precluded any consensus so far, however. This paper reconciles the empirical findings of the literature by...

The last two decades have witnessed a great deal of effort devoted to measuring the private output elasticity of public capital, but remarkably little consensus has emerged. This paper estimates the meta-output elasticity of public capital and explains the heterogeneity of primary estimates...

A recent body of literature has sought to determine the causes of the global decline of the labor share. We study the role played by government investment—which has also fallen in many advanced economies over the past few decades—in the labor share decline. We first establish a theoretical...

According to the available evidence, stronger patent protection exerts, at best, a modest positive effect on economic growth. Different variants of Schumpeterian growth models predict a wide range of outcomes, from strongly positive to strongly negative effects. We propose a Schumpeterian growth...

The paper investigates the growth effects of public capital in Portugal using annual data for the period 1965-95. Both a production function and a vector autoregressive model are estimated. Public capital is shown to be a significant long-term determinant of output growth. The size of the...

The paper studies the setting of optimal fiscal policy in a second-best world with environmental externalities. The optimal second-best pollution tax is shown to lie below the first-best Pigovian tax, particularly if substitution between labor and polluting intermediate inputs is easy, the labor...