This paper offers a simple model that reconciles rivalrous claims about liberalization's impact on low-income agrarian economies; growth can accompany smallholder welfare reduction. The model developed here reverses the causality of Bhagwati's immiserizing growth model:price shocks cause welfare...

Will smart machines replace humans like the internal combustion engine replaced horses? If so, can putting people out of work, or at least out of good work, also put the economy out of business? Our model says yes. Under the right conditions, more supply produces, over time, less demand as the...

We investigate whether robots raise or lower economic well-being for generations alive during and after their development. While capital that perfectly substitutes for human labor can increase output, it can also lower labor demand and labor’s share of income. Workers who are in retirement...

We explore steady-state inequality in an intergenerational model with altruistically linked individuals who experience privately observed taste shocks. When the welfare function depends only on the initial generation, efficiency requires immiseration: inequality grows without bound and...