The paper presents a model of fiscal and monetary policy that evaluates the tradeoff between higher distortionary labor taxation and higher inflation in the resolution of fiscal crises. In the model government debt is domestically held and nominal. Data are presented to show that such debt is...

What drove western population growth in the U.S. during the 19th century? The facts are: (i) The birth ratio was higher in the West than in the East. Both exhibited a secular decline. (ii) Between 1800 and 1810 net migration accounted for 88% of the rate of population growth in the northwest...

In a world where poor countries provide weak protection for intellectual property rights, market integration will systematically shift technical change in favor of rich nations. For this reason, free trade can increase international income differences. At the same time, integration with...

We study a dynamic bilateral matching model with private information about agents' characteristics. These characteristics affect the quality of a match and, as a result, the payoffs of both matching partners. Assortative matching maximizes total welfare. The outcome of the matching process can...

We study the endogenous formation of networks in a controlled experiment. Subjects derive benefits from being linked to others and incur costs for links they make. The theoretically predicted network has a "star"-type architecture, with "periphery" subjects linking to a unique "center". This...

This paper incorporates fertility and altruism into the ``value of life'' framework. Two dimensions of fertility and altruism are important in evaluating life expectancy and health related gains. First, child mortality can be very important in determining welfare in a context where individuals...

The five-year relative survival rate from all malignant cancers increased from 50.0% in 1975-1979 to 62.7% in 1995. This increase is not due to a favorable shift in the distribution of cancers. A variety of factors, including technological advances in diagnostic procedures that led to earlier...

Rural-urban migration has long been associated with economic development and growth in the economic literature. In particular, Todaro and Harris-Todaro-type probabilistic models that examine migration have concentrated on the expected wage disparities between rural and urban (formal) labor...

The paper provides a reconciliation of Lucas' paradox, based on fixed setup costs of new investments. With such costs, it does not pay a firm to make a "small" investment, even though such an investment is called for by marginal productivity conditions. Using a sample of 45 developed and...

We use the neoclassical growth framework to model international capital flows in a world with exogenous demographic change. We compare model implications and actual current account data and find that the model explains a small but significant fraction of capital flows between OECD countries, in...