The role of fiscal policy is examined when public goods provide both productive and utility services. In the presence of congestion, the consumption tax is shown to be distortionary. Optimal fiscal policy involves using consumption-based instruments in conjunction with the income tax. An income...

Government expenditure on public inputs such as human capital formation and public infrastructure can significantly affect productivity. An interesting and highly relevant policy question is whether such expenditure should be financed according to the benefit-taxation principle. Focusing on...

The Penn World Tables (PWT) are an important data source for cross-country comparisons in economics. The PWT have undergone several revisions over time. This paper documents how countries' output growth rates change across four publicly available versions of the PWT. We show that for some...

This article attempts to explain the large and persistent disparities in levels of output per worker across countries. It is argued that an explanation for these disparities requires an understanding of the relationship between knowledge and technology. The model that is constructed can be...

In this paper, we examine the economic policies that might allow a developing rural economy to escape from the poverty trap characterized by a subsistence level of per capita consumption in the long run. In our model where labour is combined to land available in fixed quantity to produce a...

This paper examines the relationship between international migration and source country fertility. The impact of international migration on source country fertility may have a number of causes, including a transfer of destination countries' fertility norms. We provide a rigorous test of the...

This paper presents evidence on the effects of economic liberalization of 1991 on the price responsiveness of aggregate private investment in India. The wide ranging reforms are expected to increase the price response of private investment due to (i) the Le Chatelier effect, (ii) a higher price...

This paper develops an overlapping-generations model in which agents invest in health to prolong life in both working and retirement periods. It explores how unfunded social security with or without health subsidies affects life expectancy, economic growth, and welfare. In particular, by...

This paper provides empirical evidence of an U-shaped causal relationship between the extent of the market (size of the relevant urban market) and the pattern of crop specialization in a village economy. We use the recent two-stage estimator developed by <link>Lewbel (2012)</link> and exploit...

We propose a spatial network approach to studying urban configurations by modelling explicitly knowledge transmission, aggregation and spillovers via links formed, as well as by allowing the population and the locality role (`core' versus `periphery') in each location to be endogenously...