We analyze the impact of micro-founded political institutions on economic growth in an overlapping-generations economy, where individuals differ in preferences over a public good (as well as in age). Labour and capital taxes finance the public good and a public input. The benchmark institution...

We analyse the impact of micro-founded political institutions on environmental policy and economic growth. We model an overlapping-generations economy, where individuals differ in preferences over the environment (as well as in age). Labour taxation and capital taxation is used to finance a...

The Ramsey-Romer model of endogenous growth is extended to allow for holdings of real money balances and government debt as well as capital and for non-interconnected generations of households. Tax-financed increases in government consumption and debt depress growth prospects and boost...

Workers can have good or bad work habits. These traits are transmitted from one generation to the next through a learning and imitation process which depends on parents' investment on the trait and the social environment where children live. We show that, if a high enough proportion of employers...

Is there an economic rationale for pronatalist policies? In this paper we propose and analyze a particular market failure that may lead to inefficiently low equilibrium fertility and therefore to a need for government intervention. The friction we investigate is related to the ownership of...

This paper presents an overlapping generations model to explain why humans live in families rather than in other pair groupings. Since most non-human species are not familial, something special must be behind the family. It is shown that the two necessary features that explain the origin of the...

In order to credibly "sell" legitimate children to their spouse, women must forego more attractive mating opportunities. This paper derives the implications of this observation for the pattern of matching in marriage markets, the dynamics of human capital accumulation, and the evolution of the...

A trade union whose purpose is to raise wages above the competitive level may foster economic growth if it succeeds in shifting income away from the owners of capital to the workers and if the workers' marginal propensity to save exceeds that of capitalists. We make this point in an overlapping...

In the political debate people express the idea that immigrants are good because they can help pay for the old. The paper explores this idea in a dynamic political-economy setup. We characterize sub-game perfect Markov equilibria where immigration policy and pay-as-you-go (PAYG) social security...

This paper analyses the relationship between age-specific fertility, mortality and real wages in Sweden during the demographic transition. We take an overlapping generation’s model of life cycle fertility and fit it to actual Swedish time-series data over the past two and a half centuries. The...