Tradeoffs between monetary wealth and fatal safety risks are summarized in the value of a statistical life (VSL), a measure that is widely used for the evaluation of public policies in medicine, the environment, and transportation safety. This paper demonstrates the widespread use of this...

Multiple price lists are a convenient tool to elicit willingness to pay (WTP) in surveys and experiments, but choice patterns such as "multiple switching" and "never switching" indicate high error rates. Existing measurement approaches often do not provide accurate standard errors and cannot...

Our purpose in this paper is to present a class of convex endogenous growth models, and to analyze their performance in terms of both growth and business cycle criteria. The models we study have close analogs in the real business cycle literature. In fact, we interpret the exogenous growth rate...

Economists have long recognized that total factor productivity is an important factor in the process of economic growth. However, just how important it is has been a matter of ongoing controversy. Part of this controversy is about methods and assumptions. Total factor productivity growth is...

Growth theory offers two plausible explanations of growth. One stresses the supply of productive ideas and holds that the industrial revolution had to wait until we had thought up enough inventions to lift us into the era of modern growth. It says, roughly, that the growth of living standards...

This paper studies a growth model that is able to match several key facts of economic history. For thousands of years, the average standard of living seems to have risen very little, despite increases in the level of technology and large increases in the level of the population. Then, after...

The problem of economic development,' as Lucas (1988) states it, is the problem of accounting for the observed diversity in levels and rates of growth of per capita income across countries and across time. We study conditions under which capital mobility and labor mobility (two seemingly...

As the U.S. population ages, the growing retiree-worker ratio increases the burden of public retirement systems. Is it efficient to maintain a defined benefit social security system? Should PAYGO benefits be reduced and private retirement savings be encouraged? The paper examines these questions...

This paper develops a growth model characterized by equilibrium unemployment and sustained monopoly power. The level of demand is a key factor in deviations from the steady-state growth path with a Keynesian-type spending multiplier despite the absence of any nominal rigidities. The key friction...