This paper presents a tractable endogenous two-sector growth model with non-Gorman intra-temporal preferences and directed technical change. One of the two consumption goods is a necessity whereas the other is a luxury. If the economy starts with a low initial stock of knowledge, households are...

This paper presents a two-sector small semi-open economy Ramsey growth model involving foreign aid as an input in the production function. An activist government allocates this input endogenously across sectors and optimizes policies in a non-standard way. Once calibrated, mainly on countries...

We develop a two-sector model with specific factors, in which agriculture is subject to diminishing returns and market-clearing wages, while increasing returns and efficiency wages prevail in industry. The asymmetric interaction of the two sectors, jointly with the dualistic structure of the...

We study the effects of a labor-intensive health care sector within an R&D-driven growth model with overlapping generations. Health care increases longevity and labor participation/productivity. We examine under which conditions expanding health care enhances growth and welfare. Even if the...

We introduce publicly funded education into R&D based economic growth theory. Our framework allows us to i) explicitly describe a realistic process of human capital accumulation within these types of growth models, ii) reconcile semi-endogenous growth theory with the empirical evidence on the...

We analyze the impact of increasing longevity on technological progress within a simple R&D-based growth framework with overlapping generations and test the model's implication on OECD data from 1960 to 2011. The central hypothesis derived in the theoretical part is that - by raising the...

We jointly analyze the causal effects of geography, trade integration, and institutional quality on different income groups for developing and developed countries from 1983 to 2012. Favorable geographic conditions tend to discriminate strongly between income groups as low incomes benefit whereas...

Is tourism an opportunity for lagging countries in the elusive quest for growth (Easterly, 2002)? Recent empirical evidence suggests that the answer is a cautious yes. Aggregate cross-country data show that tourism specialization is likely to be associated with higher per capita GDP growth rates...

Does trade improve institutions and contribute to long run growth? I develop a theory of trade, in which trade liberalization provides incentive to change institutions in two ways. On the one hand, trade leads to specialization according to comparative advantage, expanding the industries that do...