This paper argues that the high historical excess returns to equity are1 a result of a severe ex post bias over the period from 1915 to circa 1960 because inflation surprises during this period drove a wedge between ex ante and ex post returns to bonds. Furthermore, it is shown that ex ante and...

Evidence for the OECD countries show that the “great ratios”, such as the unemployment rate, factor shares, Tobin’s q and the investment-capital ratio, fluctuate significantly on medium-term frequencies of 10-40 years duration. To explain these medium-term fluctuations, we establish a...

The present financial and economic crisis has revealed a systemic failure of academic economics and emphasized the need to re-think how to model economic phenomena. Lawson (2009) seems concerned that critics of standard models now will fill academic journals with contributions that make the same...

The partial adjustment model for cigarette demand in Tansel (1993) is formulated as a restriction on the more general VAR model. The question whether the Tansel estimation results are spurious as claimed by Cameron and Collins (1998) is addressed in this framework. The role of intervention...

Many empirical questions about economic growth and development are left open due to the lack of long time series of reliable GDP estimates. The share of the labor force employed in agriculture can fill this gap. Agricultural employment shares are highly correlated with GDP per capita, less prone...

The sharp increase in equity prices over the 1990s was widely attributed to permanently higher productivity growth derived from the New Economy. This paper establishes a rational expectations model of technology innovations and equity prices, which shows that under plausible assumptions,...

The micro-macro paradox has been revived. Despite broadly positive evaluations at the micro and meso-levels, recent literature has turned decidedly pessimistic with respect to the ability of foreign aid to foster economic growth. Policy implications, such as the complete cessation of aid to...

The recurrent issues of "non-robustness" and "scale effects" are discussed within a unified framework for the presentation of different generations of innovation-based growth models. With a certain proviso robust innovation-based growth models tend to end up with the long-run per capita growth...

We analyse the Granger-causal relationships between foreign direct investment (FDI) and GDP in a sample of 31 developing countries covering the period 1970-2000. Using estimators for heterogeneous panel data we find bi-directional causality between the FDI/GDP ratio and the level of GDP. FDI is...

Can the knife-edge restriction on technology imposed by standard endogenous growth models be relaxed by allowing for nonrenewable resources entering the technology? To answer this question we examine whether stable endogenous growth is compatible with increasing returns to scale with respect to...