This paper introduces wealth-dependent time preference into a simple model of endogenous growth. The model generates adjustment dynamics in line with the historical facts on savings and economic growth in Europe from the High Middle Ages to today. Along a virtuous cycle of development more...

We explore the link between wealth inequality and output fluctuations in a general two-sector neoclassical growth model with endogenous labor and heterogeneous agents. When agents have homogeneous CRRA preferences and individual wealth is Pareto distributed, a sufficiently large rise in the Gini...

In OLG economies with life-cycle saving and exogenous growth, competitive equilibria in general fail to achieve optimality because individuals accumulate amounts of physical capital that differ from the one that maximizes welfare along a balanced growth path (the Golden Rule). With human...

We present a substantive and far-reaching generalization of the principal results in the economics of forestry, as formalized by Mitra and Wan (1986). Rather than a polarized dichotomy of linear and strictly concave, differentiable benefit (felicity) functions, we develop the theory in the...

This paper investigates ethical aggregation of infinite utility streams by representable social welfare relations. We prove that the Hammond Equity postulate and other variations of it like the Pigou–Dalton transfer principle are incompatible with positive responsiveness to welfare...

The paper provides a continuous-time version of the discrete-time Mitra–Wan model of optimal forest management, where trees are harvested to maximize the utility of timber flow over an infinite time horizon. The available trees and the other parameters of the problem vary continuously with...

Competition among banks promotes growth and stability for an economy with production externality. Following Arrow and Debreu (1954) [6], I formulate a standard growth model with externality—a two-period version of Romer (1986) [39]—as a game among consumers, firms, and intermediaries. The...

This study proves various global stability results for unbounded optimal growth models. The main theorem states that any optimal path will eventually be in the neighborhood of a balanced growth path if future utility is sufficiently weakly discounted. The assumptions allow for non-smooth...

Studying a one-sector economy populated by finitely many heterogeneous households that are subject to no-borrowing constraints, we confirm a conjecture by Frank P. Ramsey according to which, in the long run, society would be divided into the set of patient households who own the entire capital...

We examine whether the Phelps–Koopmans theorem is valid in models with nonconvex production technologies. We argue that a nonstationary path that converges to a capital stock above the smallest golden rule may indeed be efficient. This finding has the important implication that “capital...