Why might there be a long-run trade-off between growth and unemployment? In general equilibrium, the returns on the factors of production are interdependent. This paper develops a model where the determination of the wage is central to the evolution of these incentives. The incentive to hire...

This paper builds a dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) model of endogenous growth that is capable of generating substantial degrees of endogenous persistence in productivity.  When products go out of patent protection, the rush of entry into their production destroys incentives for...

This paper considers a model of endogenous growth with two sectors. It shows that it may be desirable to concentrate research in one sector, and so have unbalanced growth, but that the pressure of competition in research may cause the private sector to spread research too widely, and so have...

Climate physics predicts that the intensity of natural disasters will increase in the future due to climate change.  One of the biggest challenges for economic modeling is the inherent uncertainty of climate events, which crucially affects consumption, investment, and abatement decisions.  We...

This paper introduces new data on climatic conditions to empirical tests of growth theories. We find that, since 1960, temperate countries have converged towards high levels of income while tropical nations have converged towards various income levels associated with economic scale and the...

Why do so many African governments consistently impose high tax rates and make little investment in productive public goods when alternative policies could yield greater tax revenues and higher national income? We posit and test an intertemporal political economy model in which the government...

Contemporary policy debates on the macroeconomics of aid often concentrate on short-run Dutch disease effects, ignoring the possible supply model of aid and public expenditure in which public infrastructure capital generates an inter-temporal productivity spill over for both tradable and...

This paper studies the efficient taxation of money and factor income in intertemporal optimizing growth models with infinite horizons, transaction costs technologies and flexible prices.  Second-best optimality calls for a positive inflation tax and a non-zero capital income tax when there are...

There is widespread concern that an international agreement on stringent climate policies will not be reached because it would imply too high costs for fast growing economies like China.  To quantify these costs we develop a general equilibrium model with fully endogenous growth.  The...

This paper examines the (non) equivalance between aid flows and trade preferences as alternative forms of donor assistance in the presence of learning-by-doing externalities in recipient country export production. Using a two-period model based on vanWijnbergen (1985), in which the productivity...