We derive an R&D-based semi-endogenous growth model where technological progress depends on the available amount of technological opportunity. Incremental innovations provide direct increases in the knowledge stock but they reduce technological opportunity and thus the potential for further...

We address the issue of altruism when standard-of-living aspirations are transmitted from one generation to the other. In that case, the influence of altruistic parents is not limited to the bequest they could leave; indeed, they direct the evolution of children's aspirations toward raising their...

If children inherit life standard aspirations from their parents, their savings are affected and cycles may appear in OLG models with production. At some point of an expansion, aspirations grow faster than wages, savings decrease, and a contraction begins.

Capital accumulation and creative destruction is modeled together with risk-averse households. The novel aspect - risk-averse households - allows to use well-known models not only for analyzing long-run growth as in the literature but also short-run fluctuations. The model remains analytically...

We present an overlapping generations model with endogenous growth in which children inherit from the previous generation human capital and life standard aspirations. Adults evaluate their own consumption with respect to a baseline requirement which depends on their parents past consumption. The...

We analyze the effect of a constant debt policy on capital accumulation and provide an in-depth treatment of the dynamics in the economy of Diamond. We derive the conditions for avoiding a debt crisis in both the short-run and the long-run and provide geometrical tools to analyze the issue of...

We compare the dynamics under myopic foresight and under perfect foresight in an overlapping generations model with capital accumulation and two-period lived individuals. When the rational dynamics are defined and the myopic dynamics are monotonic, the study of myopic foresight allows to...

Past experiences and social forces have been incorporated into tastes in order to analyze various microeconomic issues. We use these extended preferences to model the making of standard-of-living aspirations and study their effect on macroeconomic variables. We concentrate first on consumption...

Current explanations why a growing economy necessarily goes through periods of high and low growth predict countercyclical R&D investment. As this is very controversial from an empirical perspective, a stochastic Poisson model of endogenous growth cycles is presented where the determinants of...