We analyze the effects of declining population growth on the adoption of automation technology. A standard theoretical framework of the accumulation of traditional physical capital and of automation capital predicts that countries with a lower population growth rate are the ones that innovate...

We analyze the effects of children's health on human capital accumulation and on long-run economic growth. For this purpose we design an R&D-based growth model in which the stock of human capital of the next generation is determined by parental education and health investments. We show that i)...

We analyze the impact of status preferences on technological progress and long-run economic growth within an R&D-based framework. For this purpose, we extend the standard relative wealth approach by allowing the various assets held by households to differ with respect to their status relevance....

We employ a novel approach for analyzing the effects of relative consumption and relative wealth preferences on both the decentralized and the socially optimal economic growth rates. In the pertinent literature these effects are usually assessed by examining the dependence of the growth rates on...

We analyze the effects of automation on the wages of high-skilled and low- skilled workers and thereby on the evolution of wage inequality. Our model explains the simultaneous presence of i) increasing per capita GDP, ii) de-clining real wages of low-skilled workers, and iii) an increasing...

We analyze the economic growth effects of rising longevity in a framework of endogenous growth driven by quality-improving innovations. We show that a rise in longevity raises savings and thereby reduces the market interest rate. Since the monopoly profits generated by a successful innovation...

In a growth accounting context one usually constructs a quality adjusted index of labor services by aggregating over predefined groups of workers, using the groups' relative wage bills as weights. In this article we suggest a method based on decomposing individual predicted wages into a...

High-income countries have generally experienced falling fertility in recent decades. In most of these countries, the total fertility rate is now below the level that implies a stable population in the long run. This has led to concerns among economists, policymakers, and the wider public about...

We assess the long-run growth effects of rising longevity and increasing the retirement age when growth is driven by purposeful research and development. In contrast to economies in which growth depends on learning-by-doing spillovers, raising the retirement age fosters economic growth. How...

Although many U.S. state policies presume that human capital is important for state economic development, there is little research linking better education to state incomes. In a complement to international studies of income differences, we investigate the extent to which quality-adjusted...