Corruption is thought to prevent poor countries from catching-up. We analyze one channel through which corruption hampers growth: public investment can be distorted in favor of specific types of spending for which rent-seeking is easier and better concealed. To study this distortion, we propose...

We first build a fair wage model in which effort varies over the business cycle. This mechanism decreases the need for other sources of sluggishness to explain the observed high inflation persistence. Second, we confront empirically our fair wage model with a New Keynesian model based on the...

The governments of nearly all countries are major providers of primary and secondary education to their citizens. In some countries, however, public schools coexist with private schools, while in others the government is the sole provider of education. In this study, we ask why different...

This paper re-examines the effects of population aging and pension reforms in an OLG model with labor market frictions. The most important feature brought about by labor market frictions is the connection between the interest rate and the unemployment rate. Exogenous shocks (such as aging)...

We explore the complementarities between high-skill emigration and poverty in developing countries. We build a model endogenizing human-capital accumulation, high-skill migration and productivity. Two countries sharing the same characteristics may end up either in a "low poverty/low brain drain"...

Although movements of capital, goods and services are growing in importance, workers movements are impeded by restrictive policies in rich countries. Such regulations carry substantial economic costs for developing countries, and prevent global inequality from declining. Even if rich countries...

In the centuries leading up to the Industrial Revolution, Western Europe gradually pulled ahead of other world regions in terms of technological creativity, population growth, and income per capita. We argue that superior institutions for the creation and dissemination of productive knowledge...

A long-standing challenge for welfare economics is to develop welfare criteria that can be applied to allocations with different population levels. Such a criterion is essential to resolve the optimal population problem, i.e., the tradeoff between population size and the welfare of each person...

We evaluate the effect of technology, demographics and policy on the differential evolution of the skill premium and on the rise in education investment in France and the USA. We use a computable general equilibrium model with overlapping generations of individuals, and endogenous education...