We investigate the role that climatic change has played in the pattern of urbanization in sub- Saharan African countries compared to the rest of the developing world. To this end we assemble a cross-country panel data set that allows us to estimate the determinants of urbanization. The results...

While there have been some references in the literature to the potential role of the general decline in rainfall in sub-Saharan African nations on their poor growth performance relative to other developing countries, this avenue remains empirically unexplored. In this paper we use a new...

This paper is a study of money in overlapping generations models with cash-in-advance constraints. We first offer a brief review of different features of cash-in-advance constraint. Then we propose a general formulation and study the neutrality of money. We show that both neutrality and...

We develop an overlapping generations growth model in which the individuals care about the environment. Many environmental policies suffer from institutional failures. We focus on the failure resulting from the delegation by the government of the exercise of the environmental policy to an...

In this paper we question the role of a joy-of-giving bequest motive of a privately-owned renewable resource for sustainability. We model an overlapping generations economy in which individuals are endowed with a renewable resource. This resource can be exploited at no cost by the young...

Among the rationales for social security, there is the fact that some people have to be forced to save. To explain undersaving, rational prodigality and hyperbolic preferences are often cited but treated separably. In this paper we study those two particular behaviors that lead to forced saving...

We study how mortality reductins and income growth interact, looking at their relationship prior to the Industrial Revolution, when income per capita was stagnant. We first present a model of individual medical spending giving a rationale for individual health expenditures even when medicine...

Properties of the demand of a large population introduced by the aggregation process are studied. The idea is to consider assumptions on the distribution of household characteristics rather than focusing on the modelling of individual behavior. By opposite to the existing literature where the...

This paper studies optimal earnings taxation in a three period life cycle model where the taxes raised to finance an exogenous amount of public expenditure are allowed to be differentiated across ages. Agents choose their level of education when young and their age of retirement when old. We...

This paper studies the determination through majority voting of a pension scheme when society consists of far-sighted and myopic individuals. All individuals have the same basic preferences but myopics tend to adopt a short term view (instant gratification) when dealing with retirement saving....