The elasticity of substitution between capital and labor features prominently in several areas of economic research. However, a consensus estimate remains elusive. We develop an estimation strategy that filters panel data in an original way and avoids several pitfalls - difficult-to-specify...

The author of this brief offers evidence that policies aimed at stimulating private sector investment through interest rate reductions are, at best, misguided. He concludes that, while there may be benefits from policies aimed at increasing saving or lowering the budget deficit, a higher level...

This article integrates monetary policy into a very simple dynamic supermultiplier model with an accommodating supply side. Results show that monetary policy guided by a conventional Taylor rule may stabilize an economy around the steady-state path of demand-led growth following temporary demand...

This brief assesses the effect of a capital gains tax cut on firms' decisions to undertake new investment projects and the possible effect of such projects on economic growth and employment. The authors' analysis takes into account such factors as projects' degree of uncertainty, investors'...

One might expect that rising US income inequality would reduce demand growth and create a drag on the economy because higher-income groups spend a smaller share of income. But during a quarter century of rising inequality, US growth and employment were reasonably strong, by historical standards,...

Most empirical macroeconomic research limited to the period since World War II. This paper analyses the effects of changes in income distribution and in private wealth on consumption and investment covering a period from as early as 1855 until 2010 for the UK, France, Germany and USA, based on...

This paper estimates a demand-led model of macroeconomic growth and fluctuations in which the growth rate of the economy's supply side converges to the growth rate of demand. Convergence happens because labor supply and productivity growth respond to the degree of slack in the economy. Faster...