This essay discusses the reasons for and implications of the decline in real interest rates around the world over the past several decades. It suggests that the decline in interest rates is largely explicable from trends in saving, growth, and markups. In this environment, greater government...

In the early 1970s, hours worked per working-age person in Spain were higher than in the United States. Starting in 1975, however, hours worked in Spain fell by 40%. We find that 80% of the decline in hours worked can be accounted for by the evolution of taxes in an otherwise standard...

Far away from any ideological point of view, our aim in this paper is to study, in a differential-game-theoretical approach, the standard growth model. Our baseline model comes from Kaitala y Pohjola (2009) based on the original ideas of Lancaster (1973). We focus on the computation of feedback...

High ratios of external debt to GDP in selected Asian countries have contributed to the initiation, propagation, and severity of the financial and economic crises in recent years, reflecting runaway fiscal deficits and excessive foreign borrowing by the private sector. Applying the formal...

Many cases of successful economic development, such as South Korea, exhibit long periods of sustained capital accumulation rates. This empirical feature is at odds with the standard neoclassical growth model which predicts initially high and then declining capital accumulation rates. We show...

After decades of slow growth since Independence from the British Raj, Indian economy registered its own small miracle, when growth rate of GDP per capita surpassed the long term growth rate of many advanced economies. What caused this miracle? In this paper, we search for an answer in the...

We demonstrate that a key empirical finding in environmental economics - The Environmental Kuznets Curve - and the core model of modern macroeconomics - the Solow model - are intimately related. Once we amend the Solow model to incorporate technological progress in abatement, the EKC is a...

This essay reviews the development of neoclassical growth theory, a unified theory of aggregate economic phenomena that was first used to study business cycles and aggregate labor supply. Subsequently, the theory has been used to understand asset pricing, growth miracles and disasters, monetary...

We develop and study a neoclassical growth model with a realistic demographic structure. Our model complements recent developments in the overlapping generations (OLG) literature by highlighting the natural link that exists between different classes of macrodynamic models. Within the model we...

In this paper, using recent empirical results regarding the statistical properties of macroeconomic data revisions, we study the effects of data revisions in a general equilibrium framework. We find that the presence of data revisions, or data uncertainty, creates a precautionary motive and...