The purpose of this paper is to survey the theoretical literature on wealth transfer taxation. The focus is normative: we are looking at the design of an optimal tax structure from the standpoint of both equity and efficiency. The gist of this survey is that the optimal design crucially depends...

The role of patents is threefold: first, they are important to state the property rights of an invention; second, they are necessary to secure financing for starting a new venture; third, they are fundamental to recoup R&D investments. The main difficulty in preventing unauthorized use of an...

We study the effects of an annuity market imperfection on individual agents' labour supply and retirement decisions and on the macroeconomic growth rate in an overlapping generations model with endogenous growth. We model imperfect annuities by introducing a load factor on the interest rate...

We study a closed economy featuring heterogeneous agents and exhibiting endogenous economic growth due to interfirm external effects. Individual agents differ in terms of their mortality profile. At birth, nature assigns a health status to each agent. Health type is private information and...

We analyze the relative growth performance of open economies in a two-country model where different endowments of labor and a natural resource generate asymmetric trade. A resource-rich economy trades resource-based intermediates for final manufacturing goods produced by a resource-poor economy....

We study the effects of an annuity market imperfection on individual agents' labour supply and retirement decisions and on the macroeconomic growth rate in an overlapping generations model with endogenous growth. We model imperfect annuities by introducing a load factor on the interest rate...

We study a closed economy featuring heterogeneous agents and exhibiting endogenous economic growth due to interfirm external effects. Individual agents differ in terms of their mortality profile. At birth, nature assigns a health status to each agent. Health type is private information and...

Climate change researchers predict a dramatic increase in global average temperature over the next decades. We use past temperature and precipitation fluctuations to investigate whether changes in temperature and precipitation are associated with decreases in economic growth. A GMM panel...

How do population ageing shocks affect the long-run macroeconomic performance of an economy? To answer this question we build a general equilibrium overlapping generations model of a closed economy featuring endogenous factor prices. Finitely-lived individuals are endowed with perfect foresight...

The aim of this paper is to estimate the sensitivity of the natural rate of growth to the actual rate of growth for 15 OECD countries over the period 1961 to 1995, on the hypothesis that the natural rate of growth is not exogenously given. To do this we estimate the natural rate of growth and,...