We consider an economy where individuals face uninsurable risks to their human capital accumulation, and study the problem of determining the optimal level of linear taxes on capital and labor income together with the optimal path of the debt level. We show both analytically and numerically that...

If demand for human services is inelastic or manufactured goods are necessities, labour shifts from manufacturing to services and the budget share of services rises. Higher productivity growth in the market sector pushes up the tax rate and public employment if private goods and public services...

We study the dynamic Ramsey problem of finding optimal public debt and linear taxes on capital and labor income within a tractable infinite horizon model with incomplete markets. With zero public expenditure and debt, it is optimal to tax the risky labor income and subsidize capital, while a...

This paper develops an endogenous growth model with heterogeneous firms to analyze the impact of intra-industry trade on productivity growth. Growth is generated by selection, and sustained by entrants imitating successful incumbents. Firms are subject to idiosyncratic productivity shocks and...

The aim of this paper is to contribute to explaining differences in aggregate productivity between similar, industrialized countries such as the US and European Union (EU) member states. By introducing shifts in administrative entry cost and a firm technology adoption decision in a model of...

Economists model time as continuous or discrete. The recent literature on continuous time models with delays should help to bridge the gap between these two families of models. In this note, we propose a simple time–to–build model in continuous time, and show that a discrete time version is...

Differential equations with advanced and delayed time arguments may arise in the optimality conditions of simple growth models with delays. Models with investment gestation lags (time-to-build), consumption gestation lags (habit formation) or learning by using lie in this category. In this...

Benhabib and Farmer [3] showed that a single sector growth model in the presence of increasing returns-to-scale may display an indeterminate equilibrium if the demand and supply curves cross with the "wrong slopes". We generalize their result to a model with preferences that are non-separable in...

This paper generalizes Benhabib and Farmer [4], by allowing for a strictly positive time-to-build of capital. The introduction of a time-to-build delay yields a system of mixed functional di¤erential equations. We show that the system has a unique steady state. More important, we prove that the...

Recent empirical evidence based on firm level data emphasizes firm heterogeneity in innovation activities and the different effects of process and product innovations on the productivity level and productivity growth. To match this evidence, this paper develops an endogenous growth model with...