We scrutinize Thomas Piketty’s (2014) theory concerning the relationship between an economy’s long-run growth rate, its capital-income ratio, and its factor income distribution put forth in his recent book Capital in the Twenty-First Century. We find that a smaller long-run growth rate may...

Declining hours of work per worker in conjunction with a growing work force may give rise to fluctuations between growth regimes. This is shown in an overlapping generations model with two-period lived individuals endowed with Boppart-Krusell preferences (Boppart and Krusell (2020)). On the...

This research empirically establishes the hypothesis that the process of population aging in a society as a whole affects the attitudes of its members towards immigration. Hence, an aging social environment exerts an effect on the attitudes of individuals towards immigration after accounting for...

How does population aging affect economic growth and factor shares in times of increasingly automatable production processes? The present paper addresses this question in a new macroeconomic model of automation where competitive firms perform tasks to produce output. Tasks require labor and...

This paper revisits the debate about the appropriate differential equation that governs the evolution of knowledge in models of endogenous growth. We argue that the assessment of the appropriateness of an equation of motion should not only be based on its implications for the future, but that it...

This research empirically establishes and theoretically motivates the hypothesis that population aging has a hump-shaped effect on inventive activity. We estimate this hump-shaped relationship in a panel of 33 OECD countries over the period 1960-2012. The increasing part of the hump captures the...

Prettner (2019) studies the implications of automation for economic growth and the labor share in a variant of the Solow-Swan model. The aggregate production function allows for two types of capital, traditional and automation capital. Traditional capital and labor are imperfect substitutes...

We analyze a generalized neoclassical growth model that combines a normalized CES production function and possible asymmetries of savings out of factor incomes. This generalized model helps to shed new light on a recent debate concerning the impact of factor substitution and income distribution...

We provide a comprehensive survey of the recent literature on the link between productive government expenditure and economic growth. Starting with the seminal paper of Robert Barro (1990) we show that an understanding of the core results of the ensuing contributions can be gained from the study...

We study the effect of a declining labor force on the incentives to engage in labor-saving technical change and ask how this effect is influenced by institutional characteristics of the pension scheme. When labor is scarcer it becomes more expensive and innovation investments that increase labor...