When types of workers are imperfect substitutes, the Mincerian rate of return to human capital is negatively related to the supply of human capital. We work out a simple model for the joint evolution of output and wage dispersion. We estimate this model using cross-country panel data on GDP and...

We reconsider the conventional wisdom that, in the presence of public goods and distortionary taxation, Nash tax rates are inefficiently low due to free riding. We use a model in which the public good is natural resources. Specifically, a general equilibrium model of a world economy, in which...

In this paper, we analyze government budget balance within a simple model of endogenous growth. For the AK model, simple analytical conditions for a tax cut to be self-financing can be derived. The critical variable is not the tax rate per se, but the ?transfer-adjusted? tax rate. We discuss...

We show that economies may exhibit a strong endogenous macroeconomic adaptation response to climate change. If climate change induces a structural change to the more productive sector, economies can benefit from climate change though productivities in both sectors are reduced. If climate change...

Prettner (2019) studies the implications of automation for economic growth and the labor share in a variant of the Solow-Swan model. The aggregate production function allows for two types of capital, traditional and automation capital. Traditional capital and labor are imperfect substitutes...

We propose an innovation-driven growth model in which education is determined by family background and cognitive ability. We show that compulsory schooling can move a society from elite education to mass education, which then triggers market R&D. This means that our model rationalizes two...

The paper revisits the debate on trickle-down growth in view of the widely discussed evolution of the earnings and income distribution that followed a massive public expansion of higher education. We propose a dynamic general equilibrium model to dynamically evaluate whether economic growth...

The Inada (1963) conditions constitute a defining property of the neoclassical production function with capital and labor as arguments. Are these conditions justifiable on economic grounds? Yes, they are: we show that a production function with positive, yet diminishing marginal products and...

It is a well known fact that economic development and distance to the equator are positively correlated variables in the world today. It is perhaps less well known that as recently as 1500 C.E. it was the other way around. The present paper provides a theory of why the "latitude gradient"...

This paper analyzes the link between the fact that fully endogenous growth models exhibit (or not) the non-desirable scale effects property and assumptions regarding the intensity of knowledge diffusion. In that respect, we extend a standard Schumpeterian growth model by introducing explicitly...