Over the last 200 years humans experienced a huge increase of life expectancy. These advances were largely driven by extrinsic improvements of their environment (for example, the available diet, disease prevalence, vaccination, and the state of hygiene and sanitation). In this paper we ask...

We examine the long-run relationship between fertility, mortality, and income using panel cointegration techniques and the available data for the last century. Our main result is that mortality changes and growth of income per capita account for a major part of the fertility change...

Conventional R&D-based growth theory suggests that productivity growth is positively correlated with population size or population growth, an implication which is hard to see in the data. Here we integrate R&D-based growth into a unified growth setup with micro-founded fertility and schooling...

It is widely argued that declining fertility slows the pace of economic growth through its negative effect on labor supply. There are, however, theoretical arguments suggesting that the effect of falling fertility on effective labor supply can be offset by the associated behavioral changes. We...

This paper analyses the long run effects of the 2000 Income Tax Act in Estonia in a dynamic equilibrium model. It studiesthe impact of the shift from an imputation system to a system in which companies pay taxes only with respect to distributed profits.Balanced growth paths, transitional...

Economists frequently confine themselves to the qualitative analysis of continuous optimization problems or they restrict their quantitative analysis to inaccurate methods like linearization around the steady state. The fact that the solution is characterized by an inherently unstable adjustment...

The paper analyses the interaction between capital structure and employment decisions of firms. For this purpose, a theoretical model is developed in which a firm determines employment along an optimal path taking into account financial considerations. The empirical analysis using West German...

The paper analyses dynamic investment behaviour and labour demand of the financially restricted firm. It shows that firm development is characterised by a negative correlation between leverage and the stocks of capital and labour but a positive correlation between leverage and investment and...

This paper reports an attempt to implement financial factors into a neoclassical model of optimal factor demand. The theoretical shows that factor demand decisions of firms operating under monopolistic competition or with decreasing returns to scale are affected by financial restrictions. The...

The paper presents the long-run equilibrium and development dynamics in the neoclassical growth model and a simple model of endogenous growth when property rights are absent. The results are compared to the outcome in a corresponding model economy with secure property rights. The main findings...