are consumption taxes really better than income taxes abstract we use political equilibrium theory and the neoclassical growth model to compare consumption and income tax systems if government outlays are used for redistribution through transfers then steady state equilibria in societies that use income taxes are not necessarily worse in welfare terms and may even be better income taxes are attractive precisely because they are more distortionary since this implies low equilibrium transfer levels we also find that switching tax systems typically does not benefit the median voter moreover a change from income to consumption taxes may make everybody worse off

institutions factor prices and taxation virtues of strong states many of the most pernicious economic institutions and policies create entry barriers or manipulate factor prices to transfer resources from entrepreneurs and workers to groups that hold political power these inefficiencies partly result from the fact that direct and efficient fiscal instruments that can be used for taxation and redistribution of resources are absent one might then conclude that increasing state capacity and expanding the set of available fiscal instruments should improve the allocation of resources by preventing the use of these inefficient indirect methods of redistribution this reasoning ignores the effect of greater state capacity and the change in the set of available fiscal instruments on the political equilibrium however because the availability of more efficient means of taxation increases the potential benefits of controlling state power it also intensifies costly political conflict aimed at capturing the control of the state this indirect effect counteracts the benefits from more efficient taxation and may dominate the direct benefits the paper establishes the possibility that the allocation of resources may deteriorate substantially in response to an autonomous increase in state capacity and the set of fiscal instruments it also argues that in the british case which is a key historical example that points to the central role of increased state capacity in economic development this change was not autonomous instead it was an equilibrium response to changes in political institutions that placed better checks on the exercise of power by the executive this reasoning suggests that the study of the effect of fiscal capacity and the evaluation of policies aimed at increasing state capacity in less developed economies should be done in the context of dynamic models of political economy in which fiscal capacity and political constraints are jointly determined this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item

dynamic political choice in macroeconomics we analyze positive theories of redistribution social insurance and public good provision in a dynamic macroeconomic framework political outcomes are determined via repeated voting and driven by a conflict of interests between agents voters and politicians rationally forecast the impact of current political choices on future political and economic outcomes the theory is consistent with large differences in the size of governments across societies these need not rely on intrinsic differences in preferences or technology but may be driven by self fulfilling

the persistence of inferior cultural institutional conventions economic institutions and cultures including social norms are often dynamically complementary meaning that the persistence of each is facilitated by the presence of the other the term feudal society for example refers jointly to the economic relationship of lord and serf and to the norms of subordination and reciprocity that both contributed to the smooth functioning of the system and that were its cultural expression this complementarity provides one mechanism for the long term persistence of particular configurations of cultures and institutions given the institutional relationship of serf to lord to continue the example adopting the culturally prescribed norms of subordination and reciprocity was a best response for individuals in the two classes respectively and given this culture of subordination and reciprocity conforming to the institutional arrangements defining serf and lord was also a best response we refer to this pair of mutual best responses as a cultural institutional convention otherwise similar populations with differing recent histories may exhibit differing conventions free cities coexisting with feudal manors in germany and elsewhere during the thirteenth to fifteenth centuries for example historians and social scientists have long asked why some cultural institutional conventions appear independently multiple times in human history and persist over long periods monogamy markets and primogeniture for example while others rarely emerge and when they do tend to be short

is national technology policy obsolete in a globalised world the japanese response it is increasingly argued that in a world where trade business and finance and science and technology cross national borders attempts by national governments and firms to appropriate the fruits of national technology programs are doomed to fail japan although a late globalizer is becoming increasingly globalized however japanese policymakers have responded by internationalizing japan s technology policy while retaining its national objectives this paper examines if these policies are doomed to fail or if they can be justified and if the latter whether the japanese case is special or if it is at least to some extent valid for large western countries c 1995 academic press inc copyright 1995 by oxford university press

public versus private investment in human capital endogenous growth and income inequality in this paper we present an overlapping generations model with heterogeneous agents in which human capital investment through formal schooling is the engine of growth we use simple functional forms for preferences technologies and income distribution to highlight the distinction between economies with public education and those with private education we find that income inequality declines more quickly under public education on the other hand private education yields greater per capita incomes unless the initial income inequality is sufficiently high we also find that societies will choose public education if a majority of agents have incomes below average

oligarchy democracy inequality and growth abstract this paper analyses the dynamics of inequality democratization and economic development in a political economy model of growth where education is both the engine of growth and a determinant of political participation in a context with imperfect capital markets we investigate the incentives for an educated oligarchy to subsidize the poor s education and to initiate a democratic transition we characterize the equilibrium patterns of political institutions income distribution and growth as a function of the initial income and inequalities in particular we identify circumstances under which the elite promotes the endogenous emergence of a middle class for purely political economy reasons a simple linear infinite horizon framework is then presented in this setting we discuss the importance of historical dependence for long run social stratification and redistribution

capital formation in japan introduction this chapter analyses the relationship between the input of capital and economic growth in japan during the past century the assigned task of exploring the role of investment in japan necessarily imposes a certain sectoral as well as temporal emphasis only relatively little attention will have to be devoted to agriculture since this sector never became an important recipient of either public or private capital in japan at least an understanding of the advances created by a rising level of investment deals largely with the growth of modern nonagricultural industry this also means that unlike taira and yamamura we must concentrate especially on the history of the twentieth century when factories machines and new social overhead implements reached sizeable dimensions for the first time of course no attempt will be made to slight the crucial transitional years of the meiji era or even the preceding years of tokugawa rule but one should always keep at the forefront the sharp distinction between the hesitant beginnings of economic modernization in the late nineteenth century and its full flowering during the past sixty odd years one further limiting item should be mentioned at the outset we are concerned with the input of capital i e with the investment rather than the saving side of the equation how the necessary funds were raised by individuals banks the state or foreigners will be treated only as a side issue but to a considerable extent this matter has been studied by other authors

intelligence social mobility and growth this study develops a model where the allocation of human resources intergenerational social mobility and technological growth are jointly determined high growth endogenously increases the equilibrium return to innate cognitive ability and makes the allocation of individuals depend more on innate ability and less on social background a social allocation based on innate ability and high growth will thus reinforce each other implying the possibility of multiple endogenous growth equilibria

evolutionary bargaining with intentional idiosyncratic play abstract we study equilibrium selection in stochastic evolutionary bargaining games in which idiosyncratic play is intentional instead of random in contract games the stochastically stable state selected by intentional idiosyncratic play is the nash bargain rather than the usual kalai smorodinsky solution

classical unemployment accommodation policies and the adjustment of real wages a model of wage formation and stabilization policy in economies with strong trade unions is developed the analysis provides a theoretical underpinning for the assertion that accommodation policies may cause wage inflation and ultimately reduce employment various methods of accomplishing a real wage adjustment are discussed i a policy of complete nonaccommodation 2 continued accommodation policies but with lower employment targets 3 social contracts and 4 tax based incomes policies tip

the rise of europe atlantic trade institutional change and economic growth the rise of western europe after 1500 is due largely to growth in countries with access to the atlantic ocean and with substantial trade with the new world africa and asia via the atlantic this trade and the associatedcolonialism affected europe not only directly but also indirectly by inducing institutional change where initial political institutions those established before 1500 placed significant checks on the monarchy the growth of atlantic trade strengthened merchant groups by constraining the power of the monarchy and helped merchants obtain changes in institutions to protect property rights these changes were central to subsequent economic growth

politico economic equilibrium and economic growth abstract we propose a notion of dynamic politico economic equilibrium which builds on two key assumptions policies are determined sequentially and agents are fully rational in their roles as both consumers and voters we examine a simple model of endogenous growth and infinitely lived agents where taxes on income are endogenous and where growth critically depends on the initial distribution of asset holdings we relate our equilibrium definition and results to existing literature on time consistency and on political economy and growth we show that our equilibria are time consistent and we argue that the choice of equilibrium concept might have important quantitative implications

threshold effects of corruption theory and evidence summary we examine the impact of corruption on the quality of public infrastructure we propose a model in which private vendors supply governments with inputs necessary for the production of public goods asymmetric information between the two parties creates opportunities for vendors to earn profits these profits can be re distributed to government bureaucrats without impacting on the contractual form as long as firms do not operate at a loss thus corruption adversely affects the provision of public goods only when it crosses a threshold these results are examined in a sample of up to 125 countries consistent with our theory we find strong evidence of a corruption threshold

compensations as signaling devices in the political economy of reforms we propose an explanation for why efficient reforms are not carried out when losers can block their implementation and compensations are feasible in our model a government tries to sequentially implement two efficient reforms by bargaining with interest groups the organization of interest groups is endogenous compensations are distortionary and different governments care differently about distortions governments use low compensations to discourage losers who just want to receive transfers from organizing this comes at the cost of reforms being blocked by interest groups with relatively high losses resulting in a bias against payment of compensations and the implementation of reforms

vintage human capital growth and the diffusion of new technology we develop a model of vintage human capital in which each technology requires vintage specific skills we examine the properties of a stationary equilibrium for our economy the stationary equilibrium is characterized by an endogenous distribution of skilled workers across vintages the distribution is shown to be single peaked under general conditions there is a lag between the appearance of a technology and its peak usage a phenomenon known as diffusion an increase in the rate of exogenous technological change shifts the distribution of human capital to more recent vintages thereby increasing the diffusion rate

coalitions tipping points and the speed of evolution this study considers pure coordination games on networks and the waiting time for an adaptive process of strategic change to achieve ecient coordination although it is in the interest of every player to coordinate on a single globally ecient norm coalitional behavior at a local level can greatly slow as well as hasten convergence to eciency

political equilibrium income distribution and growth this paper analyzes the impact of income distribution on growth when investment in human capital is the source of growth and individuals vote over the degree of redistribution in the economy the model has three main features first very different patterns of income distribution are conducive to high growth at different levels of per capita income second growth is associated with an externality whereby investment in human capital by one group increases the productivity of other groups thus potentially enabling them to invest in human capital third the initial pattern of income distribution and the resulting political equilibrium are crucial in determining whether the transmission of this externality is promoted in which case growth is enhanced or prevented in which case growth is stopped using a non overlapping generations model with voting i derive several empirical implications in particular the model implies an inverted u relation between levels of inequality and levels of income in cross sections but not necessarily in time series a result that seems consistent with a number of empirical studies

democracy diversification and growth reversals there exists convincing evidence that democratic countries are less volatile this conclusion is usually reached with respect to volatility as measured by the standard deviation of annual growth rates of per capita gdp which includes both low and high frequency fluctuations however recently several studies have documented that significant changes in trend growth such as growth accelerations that last a decade or similar periods of negative growth are quite common in this paper we ask whether democracy also has a stabilizing effect on trend volatility i e whether more democratic countries experience fewer and milder swings of trend growth we find a common phenomenon medium term reversals of growth that is periods of exceptionally high growth are on average followed by periods of exceptionally low growth and vice versa the propensity to experience large swings of trend growth is not uniform across countries less democratic countries are more susceptible to it when compared with factors commonly associated with volatility such as measures of quality of institutions macroeconomic policies and financial development we find that democracy is the most robust predictor of a country s propensity for growth reversals we construct a model in which non democracies have high barriers of entry for new firms this leads to less sectoral diversification fewer sectors are operated but more resources are channeled to each in an uncertain environment this leads to infrequent but large growth accelerations when one of the few sectors operated is successful however these accelerations are followed by large declines when fortunes change in favor of the missing sectors we present empirical evidence that confirms the positive relationship between democracy and industrial diversification

protection of property rights and growth as political equilibria abstract this paper presents a survey of the literature on property rights and economic growth different theoretical mechanisms that relate property rights to economic development are discussed lack of protection of property rights can result in slow economic growth through different channels expropriation of private wealth corruption of civil servants excessive taxation and barriers to adoption of new technologies the origins of property rights are also considered different theories are illustrated but more attention is paid to the social conflict view and its success and limitations the second part of the paper illustrates relevant empirical works on property rights and growth

energy security externalities and policies abstract in this paper we review conceptual arguments and empirical evidence related to two potential sources of market failure involving energy security in doing so we consider several questions involving the distinction between externality and market inefficiency and the distinction between market failures that are amenable or not amenable to correction given our current understanding of the workings of an economy several conclusions follow from our analysis regarding the potential sources of market failure and possible remedies the problem of excess wealth transfer from exporter market power may be an issue but current knowledge of oil market behaviour is too weak to support a strong conclusion other supposed costs of oil import dependence also are not well grounded including externalities related to the vulnerability of the economy to energy price shocks

total factor productivity differences appropriate technology vs efficiency abstract recent development and growth accounting studies have established that total factor productivity is an important source of cross country differences in income levels and growth rates this paper makes two contributions first it examines the sensitivity of the development accounting results to the cobb douglas specification of the production function second within the cobb douglas framework it weighs evidence of the two alternative explanations of total factor productivity differences the inefficiency view and the appropriate technology view to accomplish these tasks the world production frontier is estimated using a nonparametric deterministic approach known as data envelopment analysis i find that the fraction of income differences explained by physical and human capital increases from 32 to 55 when departing from the cobb douglas assumption there is also evidence consistent with the appropriate technology view countries with an inadequate mix of inputs are unable to access the most productive technologies moreover the world technology frontier appears to be shifting out faster at input combinations close to that of the rd it explains 43 of output variation in 1995 and its importance has increased over time

how deep are the roots of economic development the empirical literature on economic growth and development has moved from the study of proximate determinants to the analysis of ever deeper more fundamental factors rooted in long term history a growing body of new empirical work focuses on the measurement and estimation of the effects of historical variables on contemporary income by explicitly taking into account the ancestral composition of current populations the evidence suggests that economic development is affected by traits that have been transmitted across generations over the very long run this article surveys this new literature and provides a framework to discuss different channels through which intergenerationally transmitted characteristics may impact economic development biologically via genetic or epigenetic transmission and culturally via behavioral or symbolic transmission an important issue is whether historically transmitted traits have affected development through their direct impact on productivity or have operated indirectly as barriers to the diffusion of productivityenhancing innovations across populations jel j11 o33 o47 z13

the success and failure of reforms in transition economies this paper argues that an important reason why russia s performance and china s performance under capitalism have differed dramatically is that different arrangements governing the determination of prices and work practices evolved during the transition process in russia the arrangement which conferred monopoly rights to industry groups leftover from socialism prevented the adoption of better technology in china the arrangement that evolved contained no such monopoly elements the key factor in determining which arrangement evolved was the strength of the central government we put forth a model that implements these ideas and provide evidence in support of this theory

vested interests and technology adoption this paper incorporates asymmetric interest group formation into a political economy model of barriers to technology adoption with many small industries coalitions of workers skilled in incumbent technologies lobby government for a prohibition on the adoption of superior technologies the model naturally generates concentrated benefits to vested interests and diused costs of barriers to technology adoption for reasonable parameter values this smallness of industry lobbies leads to barriers to the adoption of technologies that would make all workers more productive higher government corruption can lead to lower levels of tfp and per capita output the

a model of farsighted voting i present a new method of interpreting voter preferences in settings where policy remains in effect until replaced by new legislation in such settings voters consider not only the utility they receive from a given policy today but also the utility they will receive from policies likely to replace that policy in the future the model can be used to characterize both long term preferences and distributions over policy outcomes in situations where policy is ongoing and voters are farsighted

history lessons institutions factor endowments and paths of development in the new world the explanations offered for the contrasting records of long run growth and development among the societies of north and south america most often focus on institutions the traditional explanations for the sources of these differences in institutions typically highlight the significance of national heritage or religion we in contrast argue that a hemispheric perspective across the wide range of colonies established in the new world by the europeans suggests that although there were many influences factor endowments or initial conditions had profound and enduring effects on the long run paths of institutional and economic development followed by the respective economies

rent seeking market structure and growth we study the role of productive and unproductive entrepreneurship in economic growth in a setting where firms compete in both economic and political markets specifically firms compete for market share through cost reducing technological innovation and they vie for influence over government transfer policy through rent seeking activities we find that rent seeking affects growth in two ways it allows firms to ignore economic competition leading to less innovation and it alters the number of firms that are supported in equilibrium the former effect is negative while the latter is ambiguous we show how these effects depend on various characteristics of economic and political markets

slow development and special interests this article argues that a natural implication of an innovation based theory of growth is that slow development facilitates the formation of special interest groups we demonstrate this in a growth model where innovations take the form of new goods and new production processes and where factor suppliers in individual industries can organize to form rent extracting special interest groups we then examine the effect these groups have on an economy s subsequent development we find that these groups can retard an economy s development for extended periods but not permanently their long run effect is to increase the volatility of the development process

history expectations and leadership in the evolution of social norms we study the evolution of a social norm of cooperation in a dynamic environment each agent lives for two periods and interacts with agents from the previous and next generations via a coordination game social norms emerge as patterns of behaviour that are stable in part due to agents interpretations of private information about the past influenced by occasional commonly observed past behaviours for sufficiently backward looking societies history completely drives equilibrium play leading to a social norm of high or low cooperation in more forward looking societies there is a pattern of reversion whereby play starting with high low cooperation reverts towards lower higher cooperation the impact of history can be countered by occasional prominent agents whose actions are visible by all future agents and who can leverage their greater visibility to influence expectations of future agents and overturn social norms of low cooperation

power fluctuations and political economy we study constrained pareto e cient allocations in a dynamic production economy where the group that holds political power decides the allocation of resources for high discount factors the economy converges to a rst best allocation where labor supply decisions are not distorted for low discount factors distortions do not disappear and uctuate over time most importantly the set of sustainable rst best allocations is larger when there is less persistence in the identity of the party in power because this encourages political compromise this result contradicts the common presumption that there will be fewer distortions when there is a stable ruling group

institutional causes macroeconomic symptoms volatility crises and growth countries that have pursued distortionary macroeconomic policies including high inflation large budget deficits and misaligned exchange rates appear to have suffered more macroeconomic volatility and also grown more slowly during the postwar period does this reflect the causal effect of these macroeconomic policies on economic outcomes one reason to suspect that the answer may be no is that countries pursuing poor macroeconomic policies also have weak institutions including political institutions that do not constrain politicians and political elites ineffective enforcement of property rights for investors widespread corruption and a high degree of political instability this paper documents that countries that inherited more extractive institutions from their colonial past were more likely to experience high volatility and economic crises during the postwar period more specifically societies where european colonists faced high mortality rates more than 100 years ago are much more volatile and prone to crises based on our previous work we interpret this relationship as due to the causal effect of institutions on economic outcomes europeans did not settle and were more likely to set up extractive institutions in areas where they faced high mortality once we control for the effect of institutions macroeconomic policies appear to have only a minor impact on volatility and crises this suggests that distortionary macroeconomic policies are more likely to be symptoms of underlying institutional problems rather than the main causes of economic

it s raining men hallelujah the long run consequences of male biased sex ratios we document the short and long run effects of male biased sex ratios we exploit a natural historical experiment where large numbers of male convicts and far fewer female convicts were sent to australia in the 18th and 19th centuries in areas with more male biased sex ratios women were historically more likely to get married and less likely to work outside the home in these areas today both men and women continue to have more conservative attitudes towards women working and women work fewer hours outside the home while these women enjoy more leisure they are also less likely to work in high ranking occupations we demonstrate that the consequences of uneven sex ratios on cultural attitudes labour supply decisions and occupational choices can persist in the long run well after sex ratios are back to the natural rate we document the roles of vertical cultural transmission and marriage homogamy in sustaining this cultural persistence

the survival of the welfare state this paper provides an analytical characterization of markov perfect equilibria in a model with repeated voting where agents vote over distortionary income redistribution a key result is that the future constituency for redistributive policies depends positively on current redistribution since this affects both private investments and the future distribution of voters the model features multiple equilibria in some equilibria positive redistribution persists forever in other equilibria even a majority of beneficiaries of redistribution vote strategically so as to induce the end of the welfare state next period skill biased technical change makes the survival of the welfare state less likely

barriers to entry and development we ask whether barriers to entry are a quantitatively important reason for the income gap between developing countries and the united states we develop a tractable general equilibrium model that captures the effects of barriers to entry and the other main distortions typically considered in the development literature we carry our model to the data and ask it to match the main development facts from the penn world table we find that this requires large barriers to entry in developing countries which account for about half of the income gap with the united states

credible communication in dynastic government abstract this paper studies information disclosure in a model of dynastic government when information about past policy choices comes exclusively from the reports of previous administrations each administration has an incentive to choose its suboptimal one shot expenditure policy and then misrepresent its choice to its successor consequently it has been suggested that horizontal accountability i e a system of governance where auditing functions lie outside the executive branch can ensure credible disclosure of a government s activities this paper suggests a cautious approach to that view the baseline model examines the reporting incentives of an external auditor who can independently verify the information each period even with auditing credible disclosure is shown to be problematic various extensions to this baseline model are examined in one extension liberal i e those prefering larger government expenditures and conservative those prefering smaller expenditures regimes and auditors evolve over time it is shown that conservative liberal auditors are not credible when the current regime is also conservative liberal moreover because information transmission stops when the auditor s and the regime s biases coincide effective deterrents even in the good periods when the auditor s and the administration s biases differ are difficult to construct in all periods the equilibrium requirement of auditor neutrality constrains the dynamic incentives for efficient policy choices these constraints are shown to bind away from optimal policies in standard constructions of equilibrium various ways in which auditing protocols can overcome these problems are discussed

knowledge flows in the global innovation system do u s firms share more scientific knowledge than their japanese rivals in this paper i test the common assumption that japanese firms strive to appropriate knowledge from the global scientific community while sharing little in return i found no support for this conventional perspective in the flat panel display industry u s firms shared no more knowledge with their global scientific community than japanese firms similarly japanese firms appropriated no more knowledge from the global community than their u s counterparts

learning by doing and the choice of technology the role of patience if agents learn by doing and are myopic less advanced firms might adopt new technologies while more advanced firms would stick with the old technology this kind of overtaking can also occur if agents are forward looking and have high discount rates however overtaking never occurs if agents are sufficiently patient a finite discount rate increases the set of states at which agents adopt new technologies so more patient agents tend to upgrade their technology more frequently journal of economic literature classification numbers d92 o14 o33

special interests and technological change we model an olg economy where productivity growth comes from two alternative sources process innovation and learning by doing there is a trade off between the two in so far as frequent technological updates reduce the scope for learning on existing technologies a conflict is shown to arise between the young and the old because the former favor innovation while the latter prefer learning we model the interaction between different generations and short lived policy makers as a dynamic common agency problem where competing generations invest a certain amount of resources to lobby either for the maintainance of the current technology or the adoption of a new one by focusing on truthful markov perfect equilibria we characterize the political equilibrium and show its dependence on the underlying technological parameters

r d rivalry industrial policy and u s japanese trade the authors examine how the strategic aspect of japanese research and development expenditures and industrial policies affected u s japanese bilateral trade during the late 1970s and investigate which component of r d expenditures on process innovation product quality improvements new products and new technology or technology transfer proved to be most effective they find that while japanese r d expenditures have generally promoted japan s trade advantage certain components of r d have proved more effective than other the depreciation subsidy and special status with the ministry of international trade and industry is positively related to the japanese trade performance while legal cartelization status has not had any apparent effect copyright 1988 by mit press

economic backwardness in political perspective government policies and institutions shape economic incentives and via this channel have a first order impact on economic development why then do many societies adopt policies that discourage investment and maintain institutions that cause economic backwardness perhaps politically powerful groups elites are not in favor of economic growth but why it would appear that economic growth would provide more resources for these groups to take over or tax increasing their economic returns so why don t powerful groups always support economic development in this paper we develop a theory of inefficient government policies and institutions all else equal politically powerful groups would welcome superior institutions and technologies but in practice all else is not equal because superior institutions and technologies may reduce their political power and make it more likely that they will be replaced at the center of our theory is therefore the idea that changes in institutions or the introduction of new technologies often create turbulence eroding the political advantages and future economic rents of incumbent elites alternatively new technologies may enrich competing groups increasing their threat to incumbents these considerations make politically powerful groups fear losing power and oppose economic and political change even when such change will benefit society as a whole to understand the mechanism at work and its potential applications consider a concrete example industrialization in the nineteenth century bairoch 1982 estimates that between 1830 and 1913 world manufacturing output increased by a factor of 5 see table 1 panel a nevertheless this process was highly uneven across regions and countries bairoch also calculates that over the same period manufacturing output in developed countries europe and north america increasedbyafactorofover10 whereasitdeclinedinthe third world among developed countries there were

the culture of entrepreneurship abstract we study the cultural process through which a society inculcates an entrepreneurial spirit people work for a guaranteed wage or operate a firm whose risky return depends on business expertise the latter is culturally acquired within the family or outside and people may choose an occupation different from the one they were socialized into a cultural bias towards safer occupations from colonial and post colonial policies leads to stagnation where entrepreneurs do not upgrade technology because of their proficiency with existing methods an aggregate productivity shock can tip this economy towards growth led by established businesses a human capital shock where existing business expertise is less useful is more disruptive growth occurs through the emergence of a new class of entrepreneurs we conclude that culture is not destiny it adapts even when some cultural traits do not

vested interests in a positive theory of stagnation and growth we study a positive theory of stagnation and growth aimed at understanding the large variations in growth outcomes across actual economies the theory points to the fundamental role played by vested interests in determining policies which are key to the growth process some agents seek to prevent the adoption of new technologies we develop a model of technology adoption and show how technological innovation may sow the seeds of its own destruction in particular we find that the equilibrium is characterized by a long cycle of stagnation and growth over this cycle incumbents are phased out of the economy will new innovation occur in formalizing our theory we make a methodological contribution by characterizing dynamic voting equilibria when voters must forecast the effects of different current policies on future prices and policy outcomes

factor shares and savings in endogenous growth in models of steady investment driven growth an individual s propensity to save depends on how much of his income is drawn from accumulated factors of production capital rather than from nonaccumulated factors when agents are heterogeneous in this respect growth oriented policies have distributional consequences and in the absence of lump sum redistribution their implementation faces political constraints if the median voter is capital poor relative to the economy s representative agent political interactions tend to slow down growth when policy acts on capital s income share and tend to accelerate it when investment subsidies are the policy instrument of choice copyright 1993 by american economic association

life cycle economies and aggregate fluctuations do the implications for business cycle issues change when we switch from studying infinitely lived representative agent models to more sophisticated demographic structures with finitely lived agents this article addresses that question by using a large overlapping generations model that is calibrated to u s demographic properties microeconomic evidence and national income and product accounts the finding is that the answers obtained are basically the same for the two kinds of models the article also explores the relative volatility of hours across age groups an issue that cannot be addressed by using the infinitely lived representative agent abstraction

distributive politics and economic growth a crude distinction between economics and politics would be that economics is concerned with expanding the pie while politics is about distributing it in this paper we analyze the relationship between the two we focus on how an economy s initial configuration of resources shapes the political struggle for income and wealth distribution and how that in turn affects long run growth our main conclusion is that inequality is conducive to the adoption of growth retarding policies we derive this result from a simple political economy model of growth and present cross country evidence consistent with it the key feature of our model is that individuals differ in their relative factor endowments we distinguish between two types of factors an accumulated factor called capital and a nonaccumulated factor called labor growth is driven by the expansion of the capital stock which is in turn determined by individual saving decisions long run growth is endogenous as the aggregate production function is taken to be linearly homogeneous in capital and productive government services taken together the provision of government services is financed by a tax on capital because government services are productive a small tax on

revolt on the nile economic shocks religion and political power using centuries of nile flood data i document that during deviant nile floods egypt s highest ranking religious authority was less likely to be replaced and relative allocations to religious structures increased these findings are consistent with historical evidence that nile shocks increased this authority s political influence by raising the probability he could coordinate a revolt i find that the available data provide support for this interpretation and weigh against some of the most plausible alternatives for example i show that while nile shocks increased historical references to social unrest deviant floods did not increase a proxy for popular religiosity together the results suggest an increase in the political power of religious leaders during periods of economic downturn publication abstract

diffusion of development the late industrializing model and greater east asia diffusion of development the late industrializing model and greater east asia author s alice h amsden source the american economic review vol 81 no 2 papers and proceedings of the hundred and third annual meeting of the american economic association may 1991 pp 282 286 published by american economic association stable url http www jstor org stable 2006870 accessed 15 01 2010 13 30

dynamic collective choice with endogenous status quo we analyze a bargaining situation in which preferences evolve over time and the previous agreement becomes the next status quo the endogeneity of the status quo exacerbates the players conflict of interest players disagree more often than under exogenous status quo this leads to inefficiencies and status quo inertia under certain conditions the negotiations can come to a complete gridlock players never reach an agreement gridlock can occur between players with arbitrarily similar preferences provided they are sufficiently patient in legislative settings our model predicts polarization and explains why legislators may fail to react promptly to economic shocks