Capital gains play an important, positive role in the inter-temporal allocation of resources, but they can also be a source of economic instability. We analyze a simple overlapping-generations economy with capital goods and irreversible investment. For each vector of initial capital/labor...

What can explain the long-term decline in equilibrium real interest rates? We analyze the importance of three of the most cited drivers; decreasing fertility, decreasing mortality, and a slowdown of technological growth. We do this through the lens of a general-equilibrium, two-country,...

The neutral rate of interest is an important concept and communication tool for central banks. We develop a small open economy model with overlapping generations to study the determinants of the neutral real rate of interest in a small open economy. The model captures domestic factors such as...

Phelpsís (1961) Golden Rule states an unambiguous relationship between optimal capital intensity and fertility: a rise in fertility decreases the optimal capital intensity, because a higher fertility increases the investment required to sustain a given capital to labour ratio (i.e., the capital...

To meet the needs of a broad set of internal and external stakeholders now and into the future the Australian Treasury maintains a significant macroeconomic modelling capability. Treasury's current inhouse capability is similar to that of the US Congressional Budget Office (CBO) and the Joint...

Fiscal policy is needed to avoid dynamic inefficiency and maintain full employment in a modified Diamond OLG model with imperfect competition. A distributionally neutral tax scheme can maintain full employment in the face of variations in "household confidence". No variations in taxes will be...

We show that (i) dynamic inefficiency may be empirically relevant in a modified Diamond model with imperfect competition, (ii) if fiscal policy is used to avoid inefficiency and maintain an optimal capital intensity, the required debt ratio will be inversely related to the growth rate, and (iii)...

This paper examines the role of fiscal policy in the long run. We show that (i) dynamic inefficiency in a standard OLG model generates aggregate demand problems in a Keynesian setting, (ii) fiscal policy can be used to achieve full-employment growth, (iii) the required debt ratio is inversely...

This paper examines the role of fiscal policy in the long run. We show that (i) dynamic inefficiency may be empirically relevant in a modified Diamond OLG model with imperfect competition, (ii) fiscal policy may be needed to avoid inefficiency (if investment adjusts passively to saving) and...

In this paper, we characterize the relationship between the initial distribution of human capital and physical inheritances among individuals and the long-run distribution of these two variables. In a model with indivisible investment in education, we analyze how the initial distribution of...