What determines the direction of technological progress is one of the central questions that economics needs to answer. By introducing a small but fundamental generalization of Acemolgu (2002) the current paper points out the key determinants of that direction. The extended model argues that...

The increasing dominance of finance starting in the late 1970s/early 1980s in the US and the UK, and somewhat later in other countries, was associated with two fundamental and structural processes generating the contradictions of this phase of development and finally the financial and economic...

This paper presents a model of secular stagnation, income and wealth distribution, and employment in the Classical Political Economy tradition, that can be contrasted with the accounts by Piketty (2014) and Gordon (2015). In these explanations, an exogenous reduction in the growth rate g...

It is argued that productivity gains should be maintained during times of severe financial and economic crises so that the economy gets back on track and does not get trapped in a state of underperformance. Innovation is an important factor in productivity improvement. We use historical patent...

This paper will discuss how the Financial Crisis of 2008 has thrown neoliberalism into a deep legitimation crisis. Over the past four decades the neoliberal ethic of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher has permeated American life both public and private. The principles of the laissez faire...

The fall in risk free interest rates since the 1980s has mostly been described as being induced by factors that push down interest rates from the demand side. This paper contributes to the literature by adding a view of the supply side, namely that interest has to be earned first, before it can...

The marginal product of human capital in Mankiw, Romer, and Weil's [1992] augmented Solow model measures the direct and two external effects of human capital created from schooling on national income. If this model is valid, its estimates of the share of this marginal product accruing to workers...

This paper examines the effect of agricultural development on a country's overall development and growth experience. In most poor countries, large fractions of land, labor, and other productive resources are devoted to producing food for subsistence needs. This food problem can delay a country's...

Distortions in private investment due to credit frictions, and in public investment due to corruption and bureaucratic inefficiencies, have both been suggested as important factors in accounting for the cross-country per capita income distribution. We introduce two modifications to the standard...

Variation in factor shares, extensively documented in recent years, implies that standard growth accounting exercises are plagued by measurement issues. First, the standard assumption of constant shares generates a bias in the estimation of the contribution of factors to economic growth. Second,...