In this paper we argue that the increase in the obsolescence costs caused by the adoption of new information technologies, can play an important role in accounting for the productivity slowdown undergone by the US economy after 1974. We develop a standard growth model with physical and...

Why is R&D spending so low in Spanish firms? One possible answer may lie in a small contribution of innovative investments to value creation at the firm level. When pulling together complementary sources of spending data and related evidence to measure these investments, we observe that R&D is...

We propose a new theory of the demographic transition based on the evidence that body development during childhood is an important predictor of adult life expectancy. Fertility, childhood development, longevity, education and income growth all result from individual decisions. Parents face a...

The new U.S. data from NIPA contradict some of the well-known Kaldor stylized facts, and call for a reformulation of the modern theory of economic growth. Among these new facts, three must be stressed: A permanent decline in the relative price of durable goods, a permanent increase in the real...

Economists model time as continuous or discrete. The recent literature on continuous time models with delays should help to bridge the gap between these two families of models. In this note, we propose a simple time--to--build model in continuous time, and show that a discrete time version is a...

The main goals of this study are to measure quality improvements in automobile sector in Spain and to estimate the quality bias in car price index released by INE. In order to do that, we propose an alternative methodology to estimate hedonic regressions. This methodology involves classifying...