The most influential explanations of economic growth along the past five decades rely on two main items: human capital accumulation and the dissemination of knowledge/technological diffusion. These items traditionally appear as separate growth sources. In this paper an integrated perspective is...

Resources used in scientific activities are, as any other, scarce. Hence, the economic system has, in every time moment, to choose how to allocate technological inputs. A technology choices model is developed, where scarce scientific resources are alternatively allocated to basic science...

Research activities have uncertain outcomes. The question asked in this paper is whether or not this uncertainty can be a central piece on the explanation of long run consumption growth paths. More specifically, we inquire how the existence of different research projects, with different degrees...

We study the mechanisms according to which social infrastructure influences the preservation of physical capital and, consequently, economic growth. The model considers that social infrastructure is a specific type of human capital, which acts in order to preserve already existing physical...

The standard new Keynesian monetary policy problem is, in its original presentation, a linear model. As a result, only three possibilities are admissible in terms of long term dynamics: the equilibrium may be a stable node, an unstable node or a saddle point. Fixed point stability (a stable...

Two sector growth models, with physical goods and human capital produced under distinct technologies, generally consider a process of knowledge obsolescence / depreciation that is similar to the depreciation process of physical goods. As a consequence, the long term rate of per capita growth of...

Following Jones and Williams (2000), we assume that R&D is simultaneously subject to positive and to negative external effects (e.g., the non rival nature of technology conflicts with congestion externalities). This observation allows to conceive an economy where two R&D sectors evolve without...

The paper adapts a static model of television advertising into a dynamic scenario. In its original form, the model consists on a profit maximization problem of a television network working in a competitive environment. The network sells commercial time to advertisers and tries to minimize the...

Recent literature has been able to include into standard optimal growth models some hypotheses that allow for the generation of endogenous long run fluctuations. This paper contributes to this endogenous business cycles literature by considering social interactions. In the proposed model,...

The new Keynesian monetary policy model studies the response of the inflation – output gap trade-off to policy decisions taken by the Central Bank, concerning the nominal interest rate time trajectory. Under an optimal setup, this model displays a saddle-path stable equilibrium and, if the...