Recent empirical research has shown that income per capita in the aftermath of natural disasters is not necessarily lower than before the event. In many cases, income is not significantly affected and surprisingly, can even respond positively to natural disasters. Here, we propose a simple...

We set up a simple overlapping generation model that allows us to distinguish between life expectancy and active life expectancy. We show that individuals optimally adjust to a longer active life by educating more and, if the labor supply elasticity is high enough, by supplying less labor. When...

Workers in the US and other developed countries retire no later than a century ago and spend a significantly longer part of their life in school, implying that they stay less years in the work force. The facts of longer schooling and simultaneously shorter working life are seemingly hard to...

I investigate whether demand growth and productivity growth in Switzerland have benefitted from the wage moderation that set in at the beginning of the 1990s in this country. The results suggest that the Swiss demand regime is profit-led while the productivity regime is wage-led. This means on...

This paper presents a novel dynamic general equilibrium model to examine the evolution of two major wealth-to-income ratios - housing wealth and non-residential wealth - in advanced countries since WWII. Our theory rests on three premises: (1) the overall land endowment is fixed; (2) the...

Recent empirical research has shown that output and GDP per capita in the aftermath of natural disasters are not necessarily lower than before the event. In many cases, both are not significantly affected and, surprisingly, sometimes they are found to respond positively to natural disasters....

I propose a two-sector endogenous growth model with heterogeneous sectoral productivity and sector-specific, nonlinear hiring costs to analyse the link between sectoral resource allocation, low productivity growth and stagnant real wages. My results suggest that an upward shift in the labor...

Total factor productivity of twenty OECD countries for a recent period (1971-2002) is explained using six different models based on the established literature. Traditionally, entrepreneurship is not dealt with in these models. In the present paper it is shown that – when this variable is added...

Properties of dynamic stochastic general equilibrium models can be revealed by either using numerical solutions or qualitative analysis. Very precise and intuition-building results are obtained by working with models which provide closed-form solutions. Closed-form solutions are known for a...

Labor and productivity play central roles in the aging population problem in all developed countries. The understanding of labor allocation among different productivity levels is required for policy issues, specifically, the dynamics of how workers are allocated and reallocated among sectors. We...