Why do so many African governments consistently impose high tax rates and make little investment in productive public goods, when alternative policies could yield greater tax revenues and higher national income? We posit and test an intertemporal political economy model in which the government...

This paper examines the role of sectors in aggregate convergence for 14 OECD countries during 1970-1987. The major finding is that manufacturing shows little evidence of either labor productivity or multifactor productivity convergence, while other sectors, especially services, are driving the...

We study how advances in labor-substituting (automation) technologies affect production networks. Labor-substituting advances lower the wages of substitutable workers relative to non-substitutable workers, affecting employment in the entire economy, well beyond the production chains adopting the...

To fill the knowledge gap that previous studies ignore either housing or internal urban structure and to enable better fit with important stylized facts, we construct a two-sector optimal growth model of housing where housing is produced by land and housing structure/household durables. We...

Using firm-level data from the US Census Longitudinal Business Database (LBD), this paper exhibits novel evidence about a wave of specialization experienced by US firms in the 1980s and 1990s. Specifically: 1) Firms, especially innovating ones, decreased production scope, i.e., the number of...

According to increasing marginal tendency to tax avoidance, we establish a dynamic theoretical model, which illustrates an inverted U-curve relationship between economic growth and income inequality in the long run. This finding stands in sharp contrast to the Kuznets curve—whereby inequality...

Modern economic growth is featured by rapid structural changes. In most of the industrialized countries, rising service sector is accompanied by aging population. While the young generation are more mobile and supply labor to the rising service sector, middle-aged also provide savings/capital to...

This study is concerned with dynamics of a generalized Walrasian equilibrium theory with endogenous public knowledge, individual human capital, and private wealth. The model is a synthesis of a few well-established economic theories with Zhang’s approach to modeling human behavior. It...