Recent literature on financial development and growth has highlighted the possibility of endogenous business cycles arising for particular levels of a given credit multiplier. These studies concentrate on loans directed to the productive activity and neglect the role of credit to consumption. In...

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...

Following the literature on growth, cycles and financial development, this paper develops an endogenous growth model where the source of endogenous business cycles relates to the allocation of credit between productive investment and consumption. An important role is given to consumer sentiment,...

Models dealing with monetary policy are generally based on microfoundations that characterize the behaviour of representative agents (households and firms). To explain the representative consumer behaviour, it is generally assumed a utility function in which the intertemporal elasticity of...

Technological progress produces both positive and negative economy wide externalities. Although positive spillovers seem to prevail most of the times, there is evidence and logical arguments revealing that investment in R&D can exceed the corresponding socially optimal level. Taking on board the...

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...

The sticky-information model appeared in order to offer a more empirically consistent view on the effects of monetary policy than the one provided by the benchmark sticky prices setup. Such inattentiveness framework was built on the assumption that current decisions are mainly based on past...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to discuss the valuation of human needs within a given hierarchy. An important distinction is made between private utility and social relevance of needs. Design/methodology/approach – The authors consider a generic hierarchy of needs in a world of...

It is common to recognize that ideas, technology and information disseminate across the economy following some kind of diffusion pattern. Typically, the process of adopting a new piece of knowledge will be translated into an s-shaped trajectory for the adoption rate. This type of process of...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to develop growth models that depart from the conventional framework, in the sense that consumption decisions take into account previous periods' expectations about output fluctuations. Households will raise their propensity to consume in periods of...