We propose a model of economic growth in which technological progress is modelled as an expanding random network of ideas. New ideas are created by combining successful old ideas. Old ideas are chosen according to their visibility as ideas, success as generators of innovations and age but the...

In overlapping-generations economies with perfect financial markets and lumpsum taxation, restrictions on the government budget deficits do not limit the set of achievable allocations. For economies in which tax instruments are distortionary and limited in number, deficits are irrelevant only in...

In the present paper the study of the welfare effects of endowment transfers is extended to the set of steady states of a general stationary overlapping generation model. A complete characterization of manipulations by coalitions and transfers which leads to welfare paradoxes is provided.

This paper presents an overlapping generations model to explain why humans live in families rather than in other pair groupings. Since most non-human species are not familial, something special must be behind the family. It is shown that the two necessary features that explain the origin of the...

Financial linkages smooth the shocks faced by individual components of the system, but they also create a wedge between ownership and decision-making. The classical intuition on the role of pooling risk in raising welfare is valid when ownership is evenly dispersed. However, when the ownership...

In the present paper we uncover a novel mechanism through which a minority can gain a disproportionate power in a perfectly functioning democracy, decides on a unique redistributive instrument, the tax rate. We show that a minority characterised by a high degree of social identification may, in...

The present paper is an extension of Ghiglino and Shell [7] to the case of imperfect consumer credit markets. We show that with constraints on individual credit and only anonymous (i.e., non-personalized) lump-sum taxes, strong (or “global”) irrelevance of government budget deficits is not...

Some recent research indicates that the occurrence of indeterminacy in models with externalities may be overstated because these models ignore agents' heterogeneity. We consider a neoclassical two-sector growth model with technological externalities. Agents are heterogeneous with respect to...