This paper surveys the literature on the return to education and economic growth in China and offers new perspectives and estimations. The return to education has been rising since the reform. While the overall rate of return is still low compared to other countries, young workers and workers in...

The main macroeconomic questions about decentralization are whether it has led to an overall expansion of the public sector or to unsustainable fiscal deficits. In the long term, subnational spending contributes to a larger overall government sector, but steady subnational deficits do not affect...

Empirical evidence shows that entrepreneurs hold a large fraction of wealth, have higher saving rates than workers, and face substantial uninsurable entrepreneurial and investment risks. This paper constructs a heterogeneous-agent general equilibrium model with uninsurable entrepreneurial risk...

We develop a knowledge-based growth model to address the issues of directed technological change, wage inequality and economic growth, in which skilled workers are used both in innovation and production. Since skill-biased technological change may lead to a decrease in the average productivity...

This paper demonstrates the unambiguous existence of the Tobin portfolio-shift effect in the wealth-is-status and the spirit-of-capitalism models of growth. Namely, higher inflation leads to higher capital stock in the long run, and inflation increases the endogenous-growth rate of the economy.

This short paper has formulated the Bauer-Kornai investment cycle theory in a dynamic system of shortage and the investment rate: when the actual investment rate is higher (lower) than the normal one, the shortage intensity tends to intensify (decrease); when the shortage intensity is above...

We use a panel data set of 46 countries over the 1970¨C1989 period to investigate the relationship between fiscal decentralization and economic growth. We find a negative relationship between fiscal decentralization and growth in developing countries, but none in developed countries. Several...

This paper models the central theme of mercantilism in Jacob Viner's interpretation-power vs plenty-in a framework of modern theory of international finance. It is shown that, in the Viner model of mercantilism, a nation with strong mercantilist sentiment ends up with large foreign asset...

We develop a directed-technological-change model to address the issue of the optimal patent system and investigate how the optimal patent system influences the direction of technological change and the inequality of wage, where patents are categorized as skill- and labor-complementary. The major...

In a simple model of endogenous growth with spending by different levels of government, we demonstrate how fiscal decentralization affects the long-run growth rate of the economy. Applying the model to the U.S. economy, we find that the existing spending shares for state and local governments...