The object of this paper is to show how population growth, through its interaction with recent technological and organizational developments, can account for many of the cross-country differences in economic outcome observed among industrialized countries over the last 20 years. In particular,...

Population growth has declined markedly in almost all major economies since the 1970s. We argue this trend has important consequences for the process of firm dynamics and aggregate growth. We study a rich semi-endogenous growth model of firm dynamics, and show analytically that a decline in...

Debt neutrality is said to occur if, given a program for public spending on current goods and services over time, the real equilibrium of the economy (private consumption, investment, relative prices, etc.) is independent of the pattern of government borrowing and lump-sum taxation over time....

For generations of scholars and observers, the "transportation revolution," especially the railroad, has loomed large as a dominant factor in the settlement and development of the United States in the nineteenth century. There has, however, been considerable debate as to whether transportation...

Two of the main forces driving European emigration in the late nineteenth century were real wage gaps between sending and receiving regions and demographic booms in the low-wage sending regions (directly augmenting the supply of potential movers as well as indirectly making already-measured...

We develop a novel method for assessing the effect of constraints imposed by spatially-fixed natural resources on aggregate economic output. We apply it to estimate and compare the projected effects of climate change and population growth over the course of the 21st century, by country and...

Do capital markets reflect the possibility that fossil fuel reserves may become "stranded assets" in the transition to a low carbon economy? We examine the relation between oil firms' value and their proved reserves. Using a sample of 679 North American oil firms for the period 1999 to 2018, we...

Finally we question the standard use of infinitely-lived, single-agent models, which assume, unrealistically, intergenerational altruism in determining optimal abatement policy. Their prescriptions can differ, potentially dramatically, from those needed to correct the negative climate...

We explore the principal trends that are shaping the future landscape of energy supply, demand, and trade. We take a long-term view, assessing trends on the time scale of a generation by looking 25 years into the past, taking stock of the current situation, and projecting 25 years into the...