The mechanism stating that longer life implies larger investment in human capital, is premised on the view that individual decision-making governs the relationship between longevity and education. This relationship is revisited here from the perspective of optimal period school life expectancy,...

The paper addresses the role of education policies for institutional change. Our paradigmatic model consists of an autocratic elite and a mass of hand-to-mouth workers. The elite has full political and economic control. First, it anticipates and can avoid revolutionary threats through income...

We study an optimal AK-like model of capital accumulation and growth in the presence of a negative environmental externality in the tradition of Stokey (1998). Both production and consumption activities generate polluting waste. The economy exerts a recycling effort to reduce the stock of waste....

When cheap fossil energy is polluting and pollutant no longer absorbed beyond a certain concentration, there is a moment when the  introduction of a cleaner renewable energy, although onerous, is optimal with respect to inter-temporal utility. The cleaner technology is adopted either...

This paper aims at clarifying the conditions under which financial globalization originates welfare gains in a simple endogenous growth setting. We focus on the capital-deepening effect of financial globalization in an open-economy AK model and we show that constrained borrowing triggers...

This note studies the stochastic stability of the standard AK growth model under uncertain output technology. Capital accumulation follows a stochastic linear homogenous differential equation. It's shown that exponential balanced paths, which characterize optimal trajectories in the absence of...

We propose a multisector endogenous growth model incorporating social capital. Social capital only serves as input in the production of human capital and it involves a cost in terms of the final good. We show that in contrast to existing alternative specifications, this setting assures that...

We study the compatibility of the optimal population size concepts produced by different social welfare functions and egalitarism meant as “equal consumption for all individuals of all generations”. Social welfare functions are parameterized by an altruism parameter generating the Benthamite...

We consider a general control problem with two types of optimal regime switch. The first one concerns technological and/or institutional regimes indexed by a finite number of discrete parameter values, and the second features ecological-like regimes relying on given threshold values for given...

This paper solves a second-best problem where a government has in particular to choose whether to tax financial inflows (capital controls) or not, and when. A multi-stage optimal control technique is used to this end. First, it is shown that it is optimal to switch in finite time from capital...