The role that investment-specific technological change played in generating postwar U.S. growth is investigated here. The premise is that the introduction of new, more efficient capital goods is an important source of productivity change and an attempt is made to disentangle its effects from the...

This paper adopts Keynes' view that shocks to the marginal efficiency of i nvestment are important for business fluctuations, but incorporates i t in a neoclassical framework with endogenous capacity utilization. I ncreases in the efficiency of newly produced investment goods stimula te the...

This paper is an attempt to contribute to the integration of business-cycle analysis with long-term growth. A real-business-cycle model with endogenous growth is developed and estimated with U.S. data. In the present framework, wage movements do not have to be transitory to generate fluctuations...

We propose a new measure of frictional wage dispersion: the mean-min wage ratio. For a large class of search models, we show that this measure is independent of the wage-offer distribution but depends on statistics of labor-market turnover and on preferences. Under plausible preference...

We study a dynamic version of Meltzer and Richard's median-voter model of the size of government. Taxes are proportional to total income, and they are redistributed as equal lump-sum transfers. Voting takes place periodically over time, and each consumer votes for the tax rate that maximizes his...

Has there been an increase in positive assortative mating? Does assortative mating contribute to household income inequality? Data from the United States Census Bureau suggests there has been a rise in assortative mating. Additionally, assortative mating affects household income inequality. In...

To address how technological progress in financial intermediation affects the economy, a costly-state verification framework is embedded into the standard growth model. The framework has two novel ingredients. First, firms differ in the risk/return combinations that they offer. Second, the...

What caused the baby boom? And can it be explained within the context of the secular decline in fertility that has occurred over the last 200 years? The hypothesis is that:(a) The secular decline in fertility is due to the relentless rise in real wages that increased the opportunity cost of...