This paper proposes a growth-oriented dual-income tax by combining an allowance for corporate equity with a broadly defined flat tax on personal capital income. Revenue losses are compensated by an increase in the value added tax. The paper demonstrates the neutrality properties of the reform...

The paper examines the sustainability of U.S. fiscal policy, finding substantial evidence in favor. I summarize the U.S. fiscal record from 1792-2003, critically review sustainability conditions and their testable implications, and apply them to U.S. data. I particularly emphasize the...

In this paper, we document the fact that countries that have experienced occasional financial crises have, on average, grown faster than countries with stable financial conditions. We measure the incidence of crisis with the skewness of credit growth, and find that it has a robust negative...

We argue that with interdependent utility functions growth can lead to a decline in total welfare of a society if the gains from growth are sufficiently unequally distributed in the presence of negative externalities, i.e., envy.

The idea that certain economic variables are roughly constant in the long-run is an old one. Kaldor described them as stylized facts, whereas Klein and Kosobud labelled them great ratios. While such ratios are widely adopted in theoretical models in economics as conditions for balanced growth,...

We study a growth model with two types of agents who are heterogeneous in their degree of family altruism. We prove that every equilibrium path converges to a unique steady state, and study the effect of altruism on the properties of steady-state equilibrium. We show that aggregate income is...

We develop an endogenous growth model to quantify how permanent structural policy changes that enhance the fiscal policy mix, markets' functioning, and public institutions' quality affect long-term growth and welfare. The reforms include increased public investment, reduced market power through...

Direct measures of the economic impact of sanctions are contaminated by the endogeneity that arises when other events in target countries (e.g., civil or interstate conflicts, political independence, etc.) instigate the imposition of sanctions. To address this issue, we propose a novel...

Patience affects economic growth, no news. This paper investigates the opposite causal relationship, i.e., how growth influences patience. We propose a simple theoretical framework where heterogeneous parents may choose to transmit their cultural trait - patience - to their offspring. Our model...

The paper investigates the role of real exchange rate misalignment on long-run growth for a set of ninety countries using time series data from 1980 to 2004. We first estimate a panel data model (using fixed and random effects) for the real exchange rate, with different model specifications, in...