The U.S. economy is growing more slowly than it can and should be growing because it does not invest enough in infrastructure, science, and education. There is an important procedural obstacle to funding public investments — a process of scoring the economic effect of legislation. This process...

The impact of mobile and fixed telephones on economic growth has been the subject of increasing scrutiny in the literature on economic development. It is even of interest to theoretical macroeconomists, as it provides a useful test of the positive network externalities that should be present if...

We develop a parsimonious general equilibrium model where agents allocate time across three activities: production, trade, and leisure. Leisure includes time spent socializing, which economizes transaction costs. Our framework yields multiple equilibria in terms of the number of social ties and...

We trace the impact of pay-as-you-go (PAYG) social security taxes on demographic and economic trends through an endogenous-growth model where human capital is the engine of growth, family choices affect its formation in children, and family formation itself is a choice variable. We show that...

Can a decrease in tax rates increase tax revenues? If so, to what extent? This paper builds upon recent work by Mankiw and Weinzierl (2006) on the issue by incorporating public capital into a dynamic scoring. The significant components of growth effects and transition paths, along with the...

This article attempts to bring consumption into the study of redistributive politics. Analyzing data from 20 OECD countries over the period 1995-2007, I investigate whether factors that allowed lower and middle-income households to sustain their consumption had any impact on governments'...

Critics of the Forrester-Meadows models; of population and economic growth limits have focused their attention on the excessive aggregation of the model, on its exceedingly conservative assumptions regarding technological change and, particularly, on its alleged failure to consider the extent to...

The common assumptions that labor income share does not change over time or across countries and that factor income shares are equal to the elasticity of output with respect to factors have had important implications for economic theory. However, there are various theoretical reasons why the...