Income per capita in some Western European countries more than tripled in the two and a half decades that followed World War II. The literature has identified several factors behind this outstanding growth episode, specifically; structural change associated with large migrations from agriculture...

This paper develops a neoclassical growth model with leisure externalities. Ignoring positive (negative) leisure externalities leads to equilibrium consumption, labor and capital that are too high (low) and leisure that is too low (high). The government should tax (subsidize) labor income...

We estimate the importance of preference interdependence from consumption choices. Our strategy follows the literature that tests the constraints imposed by optimality in the evolution of individual consumption. We derive an Euler equation from a preference specification that allows for...

There is a growing interest in multi-sector models that combine aggregate balanced growth, consistent with the well-known Kaldor facts, with systematic changes in the relative importance of each sector, consistent with the Kuznets facts. Although variations in the income elasticity of demand...

Long run economic growth goes along with structural change. Recent work has identified explanatory factors on the demand side (non-homothetic preferences) and on the supply-side, in particular differential productivity growth across sectors and differences in factor proportions and capital...

Recent work has documented declines in the labor income share in the United States and beyond. This paper documents that these trends differ between manufacturing and services in the U.S. and in a broad set of other industrialized economies, and shows that a model where the degree of...

There is a growing interest in multi-sector models that combine aggregate balanced growth, consistent with the well-known Kaldor facts, with systematic changes in the sectoral allocation of resources, consistent with the Kuznets facts. Although variations in the income elasticity of demand...

This paper exploits a natural experiment, the large destruction of capital in continental Europe during World War II, to characterize the transitional dynamics of an economy that begins with a capital stock below its steady state level. We use these regularities as a benchmark to discriminate...

This paper proposes a welfare criterion that balances the need for development and the concern for the least advantaged generations, and explores its implications. This criterion, called the mixed Bentham-Rawls criterion, moderates the effect of discounting, yet permits some degree of...

There is a growing interest in multi-sector models that combine aggregate balanced growth, consistent with the well-known Kaldor facts, with systematic changes in the relative importance of each sector, consistent with the Kuznets facts. Although variations in the income elasticity of demand...