This paper looks at the linkages between growth and business cycles by bringing together two strands of literature. We incorporate a quality ladders engine of growth into an otherwise standard real business cycle model. Our fundamental question is, can Schumpeter’s creative destruction process...

This research demonstrates that human capital accumulation by the poor is only possible if a minimum level of health and well-being has been attained. When families do not have enough resources to invest in the satisfaction of basic needs and health care, and finance is not available for this...

I propose the aggregate output divided by the wage rate of the industrial labourer in a country as a measure of the aggregate human capital input for that country. The justification is that the skills and the health of industrial labourers are comparable across countries; therefore their human...

Economic growth and development is a complicated process that falls into the domain of many disciplines in social sciences and humanities. It is natural then to study fundamental aspects of economic growth synthesizing research in relevant fields. In this short paper, we argue that this has...

We estimate output growth rate spectra for 58 countries. The spectra exhibit diverse shapes. To study the sources of this diversity, we estimate the short-run, business cycle, and long-run frequency components of the sampled series. For most OECD countries the bulk of the spectral mass is in the...

Using panel data for a large number of countries, we find that economic contractions are not followed by offsetting fast recoveries. Trend output lost is not regained, on average. Wars, crises, and other negative shocks lead to absolute divergence and lower long-run growth, whereas we find...

This paper examines the relationship between fertility and human capital investment, and it’s implications for economic growth, focusing on the e ects of declining mortality. Unlike the existing literature, this paper stresses the role of uncertainty about the number of surviving children. If...

This paper proposes a “before-and-after” approach to empirical examination of the relationship between democracy and growth. Rather than the commonly used cross-country regression method, this paper compares the economic performances of forty countries before and after they became...

This paper models firms' entrepreneurial ability according to their ability to predict changes in productivity (i.e., their prediction ability), and derives an aggregate production function as a result of entrepreneurship. An increase in firms' prediction ability improves allocative efficiency...

The elasticity of intertemporal substitution (EIS) at the macro level has been estimated mostly based on endowment economy models and these estimates are very sensitive to the choice of interest rates that are used for estimation. Estimates based on production economy models do not need...