One of the items that Congress added to the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, President Obama’s stimulus package, was a first-time homebuyer tax credit. The tax credit gave people buying their first home, or who had not been homeowners for at least three years, a tax credit equal...

This study constructs a variety expansion growth model with public research spending, in which public researchers raise the productivity of private R&D. We show that the rela- tionship between public research spending and the growth rate follows an inverted U-shape. This is because public...