All industrialized countries have experienced a transition from high birth rates, land-based production and stagnant standards of living to low birth rates and sustained income growth. To develop a better understanding of these economic and demographic transformations and the link between them,...

We study the competitive equilibria of a two-country endogenous growth model in which the source of growth is the linearity of technology in reproducible inputs. We begin by showing that in a model with no externalities there is a unique equilibrium; however, there are multiple ways in which the...

In this paper we study the decline of West Bengal relative to Maharashtra, historically two of the most important states of India. In 1960, West Bengal's per capita income exceeded that of Maharashtra, the third richest state at the time. By 1993, it had fallen to just 69 percent of...

This paper analyzes the quantitative role of idiosyncratic uncertainty in an economy in which rational agents vote on hypothetical social security reforms. We find that the role of a pay-as-you-go social security system as a partial insurance and redistribution device significantly reduces...

In a stochastic economy with overlapping generations, fiscal policy affects the allocation of aggregate risks. The paper shows how to compute the welfare effects of marginal policy changes that shift risk across cohorts, in general and for an application to social security equity investments. I...