We study optimal growth models à la Nelson and Phelps (1966) where labor resources can be allocated either to production, technology adoption or capital maintenance. We first characterize the balanced growth paths of a benchmark model without maintenance. Then we introduce the maintenance...

The paper addresses the role of education policies for institutional change. Our paradigmatic model consists of an autocratic elite and a mass of hand-to-mouth workers. The elite has full political and economic control. First, it anticipates and can avoid revolutionary threats through income...

We study an optimal AK-like model of capital accumulation and growth in the presence of a negative environmental externality in the tradition of Stokey (1998). Both production and consumption activities generate polluting waste. The economy exerts a recycling effort to reduce the stock of waste....

We consider a small-open, collateral-constrained AK economy. We show that the combination of CARA preferences and uncertainty on capital inflows in such an economy generates long-term (expected) growth while the deterministic counterpart does not. In this framework, long-term growth is entirely...

We review an emerging application field to parabolic partial differential equations (PDEs), that's economic growth theory. After a short presentation of concrete applications, we highlight the peculiarities of optimal control problems of parabolic PDEs with infinite time horizons. In particular,...

We study optimal sustainable policies in a benchmark logistic world (where both population and technological progress follow logistic laws of motion) subject to a pollution ceiling. The main policy in the hands of the benevolent planner is pollution abatement, ultimately leading to the control...