Abstract The United States relies for its government revenues more on the taxation of capital relative to the taxation of labor than countries in continental Europe do. In this paper we ask what can account for this. Our approach is to look at Markov perfect equilibria of a two-country growth...

We study a positive theory of stagnation and growth aimed at understanding the large variations in growth outcomes across actual economies. The theory points to the fundamental role played by vested interests in determining policies which are key to the growth process: some agents seek to...

This paper studies the implications of taxing overtime work to reduce the workweek. We study the roles played by team work, commuting costs and idiosyncratic output risk in determining the choice of the workweek. To obtain reliable estimates, we calibrate the model to the substitutability...

José-Víctor Ríos-Rull is Professor of Economics at the University of Pennsylvania. His main interests lie in distributional issues in macroeconomics, public economics and demographic economics.