Why do fertility rates vary so much across countries? Why are European fertility rates so much lower than American fertility rates? To answer these questions we extend the Barro-Becker framework to incorporate the decision to accumulate human capital (which determines earnings) and health...

Is there a trade-off between fluctuations and growth? The empirical evidence is mixed, with some studies (Kormendi and Meguire (1985)) finding a positive relationship, while others (Ramey and Ramey (1995)) finding the a negative one. Our objective in this paper is to understand how fundamental...

The recent literature an endogenous growth models has emphasized the effect that the rate of return has an the capital accumulation decisions and, consequently, on the growth rate of the economy. In most cases the basic model is a variant of the representative agent growth model. The key feature...

In this paper, we analyze the effects of changes in monetary growth rates in the context of models of endogenous growth when the demand for money comes from a cash-in-advance constraint. We explore two alternative avenues through which the rate of inflation could affect the overall long-run rate...

What determines the relationship between pollution and growth? Are the forces that explain the behavior over time of these quantities potentially useful to understand more generally the relationship between policies and growth? In this paper, we make a first attempt to analyze the equilibrium...

This paper presents a model in which a partially anticipated technological shock results, in the short-run, in lower investment and higher unemployment. Because of the expectation of future lower profits, the market value of existing firms --and the wages they pay-- decrease before the...

The most recent addition to the economics of gloom concerns the interplay between income and environmental degradation. The main question raised is whether or not continued environmental degradation is a necessary part of the process of industrialization. Will pollution continue to increase...

In this paper we study how volatility in monetary policy affects economic performance in the presence of endogenously chosen information structures. To isolate the effects produced by the interaction of uncertainty in monetary policy and (possibly) asymmetric information, we consider a model in...

In this paper, we survey the principal theoretical models of endogenous growth and explore their common components through analyzing a series of planning problems. Our aim is to provide the reader with a consistent approach to the emerging literature on growth as an introduction to the field.