In this paper we argue that the relevant decision for the majority of US households is not the fraction of assets to be held in interest bearing form, but whether to hold any of such assets at all (we call this `the decision to adopt' the financial technology). We show that the key variable...

This is a survey of the literature on Economic Growth. In the introduction we analyze the main differences between exogenous and endogenous growth models using fixed savings rate analysis. We argue that in order to have endogenous growth there must be constant returns to the factors that can be...

166 countries have some kind of public old age pension. What economic forces create and sustain old age Social Security as a public program? We document some of the internationally and historically common features of Social Security programs including explicit and implicit taxes on labor supply,...

We propose a positive theory that is consistent with two important features of social security programs around the world: (1) they redistribute income from young to old and (2) they induce retirement. We construct a voting model that includes a political campaign' or debate' prior to the...

Technological progress takes the form of improvements in quality of an array of intermediate inputs to production. In an equilibrium that is standard in the literature, all research is carried out by outsiders, and success means that the outsider replaces the incumbent as the industry leader....

Do poor economies grow faster than rich ones? This important economic question (which we call [beta]-convergence) is analyzed in this paper using two regional data sets: 47 Prefectures in Japan and 48 States of the U.S.. We find clear evidence of convergence in both countries: poor prefectures...

In this paper we propose a simple and general model for computing the Ramsey optimal inflation tax, which includes several models from the previous literature as special cases. We show that it cannot be claimed that the Friedman rule is always optimal (or always non-optimal) on theoretical...

The empirical evidence reveals conditional convergence in the sense that economies grow faster per capita if they start further below their steady-state positions. For a homogeneous group of economies - like the U.S. states, regions of western European countries, and the GECD countries - the...

In this paper I develop a positive theory of intergenerational transfers. I argue that transfers are a means to induce retirement. that is, to buy the elderly out of the labor force. The reason why societies choose to do such a thing is that aggregate output is higher if the elderly do not work....

The main goal of this paper is to estimate to what extent the federal government of the United States insures member states against regional income shocks. We find that a one dollar reduction in a region's per capita personal income triggers a decrease in federal taxes of about 34 cents and an...