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...

The aim of this paper is to understand whether international trade may enhance innovation and growth through an increase in competition. We develop a two-country endogenous growth model, both countries producing the same set of goods, with firm speciffic R&D and a continuum of oligopolistic...

Temporary employment contracts allowing unrestricted dismissals were introduced in Spain in 1984 and quickly came to account for most new jobs. In 1997, however, the Spanish government attempted to reduce the incidence of temporary employment by reducing payroll taxes and dismissal costs for...

The effects of competition on growth are analyzed in the recent literature by comparing economies with the same market structure but different degrees of substitutability. In this note, we show that in a general equilibrium model with monopolistic competition à la Dixit-Stiglitz the effect of...