We study a series of sustained growth models in which households' preferences are affected by the consumption of other households as summarized by average consumption. In endogenous growth models, the equilibrium paths involve lower savings and lower growth than the corresponding efficient...

Mit dem neuen Jahr beherrschen andere Sichtweisen die wirtschaftspolitische Diskussion. Trotz relativ guenstiger Prognosen wird die Wirtschaftsentwicklung in den Vereinigten Staaten ganz anders beurteilt. Es hat den Anschein, als ob Stimmungsschwankungen zunehmen. Mehr und aktuelle Informationen...

This project re-investigates the hookworm eradication efforts of the Rockefeller Foundation's Sanitary Commission (RSC) in the American South during the Progressive Era. The RSC worked to eradicate hookworm across 11 southern states between 1911 and 1915, efforts that have been linked to...

We investigate empirically how party ideology influences size and scope of government as measured by the size of government, tax structure and labor market regulation. Our dataset comprises 49 US states over the 1993-2009 period. We employ the new data onthe ideological mapping of US...

In this paper, we test the neoclassical growth model and its main prediction of conditional convergence of productivity for a sample of transition countries over the period 1990-2002. We split the sample into three periods: 1990-1994, 1994-1998 and 1998-2002 and confirm the convergence...

The recent changes in the national accounts unequivocally imply that the nature of the measured growth rate and business cycle has changed. This note investigates to what extent.

We report evidence that the relation between the financial sector share, private savings and growth in the United States 1948-1996 is characterized by several regime shifts. The finding is based on vector autoregressions on quarterly data that allow for Markov switching regimes. The evidence may...

This paper analyses the Canadian economy for the post 1960 period. It uses an accounting procedure developed in Chari, Kehoe, and McGrattan (2006). The procedure identifies accounting factors that help align the predictions of the neoclassical growth model with macroeconomic variables observed...

The acceleration of productivity since 1995 has prompted a debate over whether the economy's underlying growth rate will remain high. In this paper, we propose a methodology for estimating trend growth that draws on growth theory to identify variables other than productivity - namely consumption...