We present the first attempt to construct a long-run historical measure of subjective wellbeing using language corpora derived from millions of digitized books. While existing measures of subjective wellbeing go back to at most the 1970s, we can go back at least 200 years further using our...

This is a survey of some of the key studies in the literature on international migration in history that may be described as cliometric. This literature uses the concepts and approaches of applied economics to investigate a range of historical issues and there are strong parallels with the...

This paper presents a non-Malthusian theory of long-term development We model the interplay between the process of human capital formation, technological progress, and the biological constraint of finite lifetime expectancy. All these processes are interdependent and determined endogenously. The...

We analyze the interaction between risk sharing and capital accumulation in a stochastic OLG model with production. We give a complete characterization of interim Pareto optimality. Our characterization also subsumes equilibria with a PAYG social security system. In a competitive equilibrium...

For more than two decades now, current-account imbalances are a crucial issue in the international policy debate as they threaten the stability of the world economy. More recently, the government debt crisis of the European Union shows that internal current account imbalances inside a currency...

This paper presents a simple, analytically solvable Chamberlinian agglomeration model. As in the canonical core-periphery (CP) model, two agglomerative forces are at work. However, the present model exhibits a "pitchfork bifurcation" rather than the "tomahawk bifurcation" of the CP model.

We consider a model with frictional unemployment and staggered wage bargaining where hours worked are negotiated every period. The workers' bargaining power in the hours negotiation affects both unemployment volatility and inflation persistence. The closer to zero this parameter, (i) the more...

Commodity price increases associated with the entry of China, India and other countries into the world economy has led to increased pressure on common-property renewable natural resources (NR). The problem is particularly worrisome for economies that obtain a large share of their income from the...

This paper proposes a theoretical framework to analyze the impacts of credit and technology shocks on business cycle dynamics, where firms rely on banks and households for capital financing. Firms are identical ex ante but differ ex post due to different realizations of firm specific technology...