do greens drive hummers or hybrids environmental ideology as a determinant of consumer choice this paper uses several california data sets to test for differences in consumption patterns between greens and browns a person s environmentalism is rarely observed in consumer data sets in california a community s share of green party registered voters is a viable proxy for community environmentalism environmentalists are more likely to commute by public transit purchase hybrid vehicles and consume less gasoline than non environmentalists

competition and corporate performance are people right to think that competition improves corporate performance my investigations indicate first that there are some theoretical reasons for believing this hypothesis to be correct but they are not overwhelming furthermore the existing empirical evidence on this question is weak however the results reported here based on an analysis of around 670 u k companies do provide some support for this view most important i present evidence that competition as measured by increased numbers of competitors or by lower levels of rents is associated with a significantly higher rate of total factor productivity growth

fiscal policy and growth in a small open economy with elastic labour supply endogenizing labour supply leads to fundamental changes in the equilibrium structure of the ak growth model of a small open economy the balanced growth equilibrium is described by two tradeoff loci relating the equilibrium growth rate to the fraction of time devoted to leisure the implications of endogenous labour supply for fiscal policy are addressed the effects of distortionary taxes and government expenditure on the equilibrium growth leisure employment tradeoff are analysed the responses contrast with both those of a closed economy having an elastic labour supply and an open economy with fixed labour supply optimal fiscal policy is also characterized jel classification f41 f43 politique fiscale et croissance dans une petite economie ouverte quand l offre de travail est elastique l endogeneisation de l offre de travail entraine des changements fondamentaux dans la structure d equilibre du modele de croissance du type ak d une petite economie ouverte l equilibre de croissance balancee est decrit par deux lieux de relations d equivalence reliant le taux de croissance d equilibre a la fraction du temps allouee au loisir on examine les implications de cette endogen6isation de l offre de travail pour la politique fiscale on analyse les effets de taxes distorsionnantes et des depenses gouvemementales sur la relation d 6equivalence entre taux de croissance et loisir et donc emploi on obtient des reactions differentes de celles qu on obtient en economie ferm6e quand l offre de travail est elastique et en economie ouverte quand l offre de travail est fixe on proc ede alors a la definition de la politique fiscale optimale

state business relations and economic growth in sub saharan africa abstract this paper contributes to the literature on the determinants of economic growth in sub saharan africa by examining the effect of effective state business relations on economic growth for a panel of 19 sub saharan african countries for the period 1970 2004 we propose a measure that we argue captures the various dimensions of effective state business relations in sub saharan africa we then estimate standard growth regressions using dynamic panel data methods with this measure along with the more conventionally used measures of institutional quality such as degree of executive constraints the rule of law the degree of corruption and the quality of the bureaucracy our results show that effective state business relations contribute significantly to economic growth countries which have shown improvements in state business relations have witnessed higher economic growth controlling for other determinants of economic growth and independent of other measures of institutional quality

peer effects in the diffusion of solar photovoltaic panels social interaction peer effects are recognized as a potentially important factor in the diffusion of new products in the case of environmentally friendly goods or technologies both marketers and policy makers are interested in the presence of causal peer effects as social spillovers can be used to expedite adoption we provide a methodology for the simple straightforward identification of peer effects with sufficiently rich data avoiding the biases that occur with traditional fixed effects estimation when using the past installed base of consumers in the reference group we study the diffusion of solar photovoltaic panels in california and find that at the average number of owner occupied homes in a zip code an additional installation increases the probability of an adoption in the zip code by 0 78 percentage points our results provide valuable guidance to marketers designing strategies to increase referrals and reduce customer acquisition costs they also provide insights into the diffusion process of environmentally friendly technologies

schooling and public capital in a model of endogenous growth this paper studies the allocation of public spending between education services and infrastructure investment in an endogenous growth model where public capital in infrastructure affects the process of human capital accumulation the balanced growth path is derived and the dynamics associated with a budget neutral reallocation of spending from education to infrastructure are studied through numerical simulations the growth maximizing tax rate is shown to depend only on the production technology as in standard flow models of public expenditure whereas the optimal share of infrastructure investment depends also on the productiveness of infrastructure relative to education services in the schooling technology

is the relationship between financial development and economic growth monotonic evidence from a sample of middle income countries summary we revisit the relationship between financial development and economic growth in a panel of 52 middle income countries over the 1980 2008 period using pooled mean group estimations in a dynamic heterogeneous panel setting we show that there is an inverted u shaped relationship between finance and growth in the long run in the short run the relationship is insignificant this suggests that too much finance can exert a negative influence on growth in middle income countries the finding of a non monotonic effect of financial development on growth is confirmed by estimating a threshold model

variance properties of solow s productivity residual and their cyclical implications abstract for the united states economy 1960 1989 the correlation between the growth rates of the solow residual and the real price of energy government spending is 0 55 0 09 this study develops a model to see if it quantitatively captures the endogenous transmission mechanism underlying the observed solow residual correlations it does the transmission mechanism depends on endogenous capital utilization incorporating shocks to true technology energy prices and government spending the model economy accounts for 76 or 89 percent of u s output volatility and is generally consistent with features of u s business cycles

the effects of competition policy on development cross country evidence using four new indicators abstract over the last two decades many developing countries have introduced competition policies this paper introduces four new indicators on various aspects of competition laws and competition agencies to make competition policies comparable these indicators are used to estimate the effects of competition policies and all four contribute at least marginally to explaining differences in total factor productivity this is also true if developing countries are analysed separately in addition to the direct effects of competition policy on total factor productivity an indirect effect is identified countries scoring high with regard to competition policy suffer less from corruption

congestion function specification and the publicness of local public goods abstract this paper is about the measurement of congestion within the median voter demand framework the model of congestion traditionally used in the literature and four others are compared and tested in a median voter framework the results show that a more flexible functional form which imposes fewer a priori restrictions on the data does at least as good a job of explaining variations in local government expenditures furthermore it is shown that measured publicness of local public goods depends entirely on the a priori restrictions imposed on the congestion function

the relevance of attitudinal factors for the acceptance of energy policy measures a micro econometric analysis abstract this paper empirically examines the individual support of the german energy transition in total and especially of six single energy policy measures which are components of the energy transition our micro econometric analysis with binary and ordered probit models on the basis of data from a broad survey of citizens reveals the important role of several attitudinal factors with respect to our indicators for perceived personal costs of the energy transition the estimation results point to a weak evidence for economic self interest due to some negative correlations between expected energy price increases due to the energy transition and the support of single energy policy measures interestingly however the concern that the energy transition alone causes strong energy price increases is not shared by the majority of the respondents the estimation results also suggest that the support of several energy policy measures is strongly correlated with environmental values however the most important attitudinal factor is obviously political identification the econometric analysis suggests that an overall left green policy identification is positively correlated with the support of the energy transition in total and an identification with ecological policy is positively correlated with the acceptance of several single energy policy measures the econometric analysis especially supports the more sophisticated categorization of political orientation since for example a liberal conservative policy orientation is not significantly correlated with the support of the energy transition in total

an alternative to steady state comparisons in perfect foresight models abstract this note examines a technique for the computation of the welfare impact of a pertubation of the steady state in a typical perfect foresight model the major innovation is the ability to analyze non stationary perturbations

industrial organization paradigms empirical evidence and the economic case for competition policy the recent reform of competition policy in canada prompts one to ask whether there remains a tenable economi c case for antitrust policy to answer this question this paper begi ns by sketching competing industrial organization i o paradigms th e empirical evidence bearing on these paradigms particularly the m ainline structure conduct performance paradigm which has provided the main theoretical support for competition policy is examined it is concluded that recent theoretical and empirical work in i o have undermined the traditional economic case for competition policy the last section of the paper attempts a partial reconstruction of the ca se for competition policy along somewhat unorthodox lines

public budgetary rules and gdp growth an empirical study on oecd and twelve european countries we study the long term effects of budgetary rules on gdp growth rate and analyse the determinants of the short term gdp growth dynamics for both a sample of 19 oecd and a subsample of 12 european countries we show that in the long run improvements in the cyclically adjusted budget balance as well as increases in the tax burden have negative effects on gdp growth the highest effect of fiscal policy on gdp growth would be obtained if the structural deficits were used to increase the market size by reducing the tax burden in line with barro 1990 a deficit financed reduction of tax burden has a stronger effect for european than for oecd countries because in europe the government size with respect to market size is too large therefore if gdp growth is a dominant policy objective in europe specific actions should redress the 2012 treaty toward a reduction of the tax burden

filling potholes macroeconomic effects of maintenance versus new investments in public infrastructure abstract the maintenance of existing public infrastructure has often been neglected in favor of building new infrastructure in developing countries this paper develops a dynamic general equilibrium model that analyzes the reasons and effects of such neglect first the optimal level of maintenance is shown to depend on the size of new investments as a share of existing public infrastructure and on the productivity of infrastructure second the model is parameterized and solved numerically for a sample of latin american countries quantitative results show that reallocating funds from new infrastructure to maintenance can have positive effects on these countries gdp

indeterminacy under constant returns to scale in multisector economies recently there has been a renewed interest in indeterminacy or alternatively put in the existence of a continuum of equilibria in dynamic economies that exhibit some market imperfections one of the primary concerns of this literature has been the empirical plausibility of indeterminacy which arises in markets with external effects or with monopolistic competition often coupled with some degree 10 of increasing returns

infrastructure investment a review essay economists try not to be faddists but they often cannot help themselves while work on a topic should mirror the prospective importance of the topic that situation seems to occur with disappointing frequency instead the usual pattern is that some reasonably important topic will be totally ignored for the longest time then recognized and then the subject of a flurry of work all out of proportion to its likely long run importance nowhere has this speculative bubble of economic research been more clearly illustrated than with infrastructure investment macroeconomists havelong felt that the stock of public capital is an important factor input in the production of total output macroeconomists have known that u s productivity growth slowed dramatically in about 1973 and macroeconomists should have known that united states investment in public capital has been down since the late 1960s yet analysis of the u s productivity slowdown completely ignored infrastructure investment for the first fifteen years of this slowdown concentrating instead on energy prices social regulation the composition of the work force research and development different rates of obsolescence of the private capital stock and any number of other matters the public capital stock was hardly ever even mentioned as a potential factor in the productivity slowdown aschauer changed all that he wrote a series of papers 1989a 1989b 1989c that put these two movements together econometrically infrastructure investment turned down and aggregate productivity turned down slightly later both in the united states and in some other developed countries his work hit the magic button those who had worried about the productivity puzzle for fifteen years welcomed a new suspect those who were worried about low rates of u s national saving welcomed a new way to make their argument even more forcefully than with official figures on saving and investment which do not count infrastructure investment as investment political liberals and liberal politicians saw a way to rescue government spending and projects from the assaults of reaganism and even a way to avoid oth

technology growth and the business cycle using a partial equilibrium model that allows for factor hoarding i construct series on input utilization rates for ten oecd countries these series are used in growth accounting computations of total factor productivity which filter out cyclical variations in input utilization rates the main findings are as follows i adjusted solow residuals grow consistently faster than standard measures ii the variability of the adjusted solow residual is in some cases smaller than the standard residual s iii adjusted solow residuals are less procyclical than standard residuals and fare better at usual exogeneity tests iv supply shocks are no more synchronized between european countries than elsewhere and v observed increased output synchronization in europe is due to demand factors

competition policy implementation in transition economies an empirical assessment abstract between 1990 and 1996 competition laws have been adopted in 22 of the 26 transition economies of eastern europe and the former soviet union yet there is very little systematic evidence about implementation experience and none regarding its impact on intensity of economy wide competition the novelty of this paper is twofold first it defines a range of competition policy implementation criteria relevant for transition and developing economies along the three main dimensions of enforcement competition advocacy and institutional effectiveness these classification criteria go significantly beyond the traditional emphasis on abuse of dominance agreement and merger cases second it provides an assessment of the effectiveness of competition policy implementation across 18 countries along these criteria based on data from each country s competition authorities and supplemented with assessments by legal practitioners the relationship between competition policy and intensity of competition is explored with the latter captured by a measure of economy wide enterprise mobility that reflects selection effects we find a robust positive relationship between effective competition policy implementation and expansion of more efficient private firms

scale congestion and growth this paper explores the relationship between aggregate and relative congestion returns to scale and economic growth aggregate congestion reduces the effective productivity of capital relative congestion reduces the effective productivity of labour both forms of congestion adversely affect the equilibrium growth rate although their relative effects depend upon aggre gate returns to scale the two forms of congestion have contrasting effects on the transitional dynamics relative congestion retards the rate of adjustment aggregate congestion accelerates it the externalities generated by congestion and non optimal expenditure can be fully cor rected both during the transition and in steady state by a time invariant income tax the role of public expenditure as an instrument of economic growth has been a major policy issue as governments throughout the world design stimulus packages as in japan and face difficult choices to meet the emu criteria in europe empirical research investigating the impact of public investment on the productivity of private capital and output was stimulated by aschauer 1989a b who found the effects to be strongly positive the nature of public investment is however diverse in general public goods vary extensively in terms of the nature of their services spanning the range between the polar cases of pure private and pure public goods but the treatment of public expenditures in formal growth models is limited barro 1990 and futagami et al 1993 treat government expenditure as a pure pub lic good and in so doing they fail to take account of the congestion typically associated with public goods however as barro and sala i martin 1992 have argued almost all public services are characterized by some degree of congestion so that the pure public good should be viewed as only a bench mark these considerations suggest that congestion is an important consider ation in assessing the effect of public expenditures on economic growth attempts to analyse the effects of congestion on economic growth have been limited in various dimensions drawing on the public goods literature edwards 1990 proposes a number of specifications of congestion two notions particularly relevant in a growth context are relative congestion and aggregate absolute congestion the former specifies the level of services derived by an individual from the provision of a public good in terms of the usage of his individual capital stock relative to the aggregate capital stock aggregate congestion sometimes called crowding indicates how aggregate usage of the service alone influences the services received by an individual 2 existing applications of congestion to growth theory introduce it into ak models see barro and sala i martin 1992 1995 glomm and ravikumar 1994 1997 and turnovsky 1996 1997 however the ak model features two limitations that restrict its flexibility to examine the relationship between congestion and growth first as solow 1994 pointed out sustained ongoing

productive government expenditures and long run growth the purpose of this paper is to review some of the recent developments in endogenous growth models specifically our focus is on the growth effects of productive government spending in dynamic general equilibrium models we use a simple overlapping generations model as our basic framework and illustrate the role of taxes and spending we then examine several related issues nonrivalry in publicly provided goods existence and uniqueness of competitive equilibrium endogenous public policy ways of financing public expenditures composition of publicly provided goods and services and private alternatives finally we review some empirical results related to output elasticity of public capital and educational expenditures

getting help from abroad the macroeconomics of foreign direct investment in infrastructure in low income countries infrastructure financing needs in most low income countries are substantial but funding for such needs is only partly covered by national governments and aid donors this paper introduces foreign direct investment fdi through public private partnerships as a source of infrastructure financing in low income countries a two sector open economy model is developed to assess the macroeconomic performance of fdi in infrastructure with efficient foreign investment an increase in revenue generating infrastructure investment boosts productivity and spurs private investment while stabilizing domestic prices a direct comparison between infrastructure financed by domestic versus foreign investment shows that foreign investment creates higher output growth and welfare gains and is preferable to domestically sourced investment irrespective of the underlying financing instrument the domestic economy is employing fdi in non revenue generating infrastructure is also analyzed and discussed

sectoral adjustment costs and real exchange rate dynamics in a two sector dependent economy abstract this paper develops a two sector model in which intersectoral capital movements involve adjustment costs expressed as capital lost in the transformation process these costs have important consequences for the dynamics of capital accumulation and particularly for real exchange rate dynamics persistent deviations of the real exchange rate from its equilibrium are derived and for plausible values of the adjustment cost parameters are consistent with the observed degree of real exchange rate persistence for low adjustment costs the dynamics are qualitatively similar to those of the standard heckscher ohlin technology for high adjustment costs the model converges to the specific factors model thus our framework includes these two standard models as polar extremes

public investment in infrastructure in a simple growth model abstract in this paper we examine the implications for capital accumulation when infrastructure enters as an external input into private production functions in our model infrastructure is nonexclusive but may exhibit varying degrees of nonrivalry revenues from uniform taxes on capital and labor income are used to finance public investment in infrastructure we show that the optimal tax rate is independent of the degree of nonrivalry when production exhibits constant returns to augmentable factors the equilibrium displays constant growth for most parameters the growth rate depends on the population size under decreasing returns the optimal trajectory exhibits monotonic convergence to a steady state level

do liberal home owners consume less electricity a test of the voluntary restraint hypothesis using a unique data set that merges an electric utility s residential customer monthly electricity consumption in 2008 with household level data on demographics structure and neighborhood characteristics and the political party of registration for the head of household this paper documents that liberal households consume less electricity than observationally identical households in the absence of first best carbon pricing such voluntary restraint helps to mitigate the challenge of climate change

factor hoarding and the propagation of business cycles shocks this paper analyzes the role of variable capital utilization rates in propagating shocks over the business cycle to this end we formulate and estimate an equilibrium business cycle model in which cyclical capital utilization rates are viewed as a form of factor hoarding we find that variable capital utilization rates substantially magnify and propagate the impact of shocks to agents environments the strength of these propagation effects is evident in the dynamic response functions of various economy wide aggregates to shocks in agents environments in the statistics that we construct to summarize the strength of the propagation mechanisms in the model and in the volatility of exogenous technology shocks needed to explain the observed variability in aggregate u s output other authors have argued that standard real business cycle rbc models fail to account for certain features of the data because they do not embody quantitatively important propagation mechanisms these features include the observed positive serial correlation in the growth rate of output the shape of the spectrum of the growth rate of real output and the correlation between the forecastable component of real output and various other economic aggregates allowing for variable capital utilization rates substantially improves the ability of the model to account for these features of the data

legal environment finance channels and investment the east african example abstract how do legal environments and finance affect investments by firms in the east african community property rights external and internal finance channels key conduits of the transmission mechanism from legal environment to investment individually and interactively affect firms decision to invest firms that perceive secure property rights are more likely to invest in fixed capital the interactions suggest governments in this community would do well to pursue investment growth policies that slant heavily towards financial markets deepening while not ignoring enhancement of legal infrastructures overall property rights external finance internal finance firm size and an export orientation are important determinants of the investment decision

the dynamics of industrial mark ups in two small open economies does national competition policy matter abstract in this paper we investigate the impact of competition policy on the level and the dynamics of firm price cost margins in two european countries belgium and the netherlands we study three questions i did the changes in the competition law and policy that took place in belgium in 1993 have an effect on the level and the evolution of the price cost margins of firms ii are price mark ups in the netherlands where there was no strict competition policy until recently higher than in belgium iii is openness import competition sufficient to discipline firm behaviour we find that the introduction of a new competition policy in belgium did not have any effect on the price mark ups in belgium we also find that mark ups in the netherlands are higher than those in belgium finally we find that import competition does not lead to lower price cost margins we offer a number of explanations and implications

political orientation environmental values and climate change beliefs and attitudes an empirical cross country analysis abstract based on unique data from representative computer based surveys among more than 3400 citizens this paper empirically examines the determinants of several climate change beliefs and attitudes in three countries which are key players in international climate policy namely the usa germany as the largest country in the european union and china our econometric analysis implies that political orientation in the usa is by far more relevant for general climate change beliefs and beliefs in anthropogenic climate change than in germany and china furthermore us and german citizens with a conservative but not green identification significantly less often support publicly financed climate policy while us and german respondents with a social green identification and chinese respondents belonging to the communist party have a significantly higher willingness to pay a price premium for climate friendly products however our econometric analysis overall reveals that environmental values which are measured by a new ecological paradigm nep scale are the major factors for climate change beliefs and attitudes in all three countries and thus play an even more dominant role than political orientation in addition environmental values weaken the differences in several climate change beliefs and attitudes between a right wing and a left wing identification these interaction effects between political orientation and the nep scale are especially strong in the usa only relevant for the support of publicly financed climate policy in germany and negligible in china our estimation results suggest alternative strategies such as specific communication campaigns in order to reduce the climate change skepticism in conservative and right wing circles in the usa and to increase the support of climate policies among such population groups

heterogeneous preferences and the individual change to alternative electricity contracts abstract based on data from a large scale computer based survey among more than 3700 citizens in germany this paper empirically disentangles the determinants of the general change of electricity contracts and the specific change from any green or non green to current green electricity contracts within the last ten years our econometric analysis reveals a strong relevance of behavioral factors and individual values and norms for example patience which was measured by an incentivized experiment included in the survey has a significantly positive effect on both general switches to alternative electricity contracts and specific switches to green electricity contracts furthermore trust and less robust social preferences also measured by an incentivized experiment have additional significantly positive effects on the specific change to green electricity contracts our estimation results also imply an important role of political identification i e an ecological policy orientation is strongly significantly positively correlated with the change to green electricity contracts furthermore several household specific factors like relocation decisions as well as socio demographic and socio economic variables like household income are also relevant the empirical analysis thus provides new explanation patterns for the phenomenon that relatively few households regularly change their electricity contracts and specifically switch to green electricity contracts although they have high stated preferences for such changes our insights suggest several directions for policy and electricity suppliers to increase these switching rates for example the high importance of trust for the change to green electricity contracts suggests transparency initiatives of electricity suppliers to decrease concerns against renewable energies

transitional dynamics in two sector models of endogenous growth the steady state and transitional dynamics of two sector models of endogenous growth are analyzed in this paper we describe necessary conditions for endogenous growth the conditions allow us to reduce the dynamics of the solution to a system with one state like and two control like variables we analyze the determinants of the long run growth rate we use the time elimination method to analyze the transitional dynamics of the models we find that there are transitions in real time if the point in time production possibility frontier is strictly concave which occurs for example if the two production functions are different or if there are decreasing point in time returns in any of the sectors we also show that if the models have a transition in real time the models are globally saddle path stable we find that the wealth or consumption smoothing effect tends to dominate the substitution or real wage effect so that the transition from relatively low levels of physical capital is carried over through high work effort rather than high savings we develop some empirical implications we show that the models predict conditional convergence in that in a cross section the growth rate is predicted to be negatively related to initial income but only after some measure of human capital is held constant thus the models are consistent with existing empirical cross country evidence authors

spill over effects of supply side changes in a two country economy with capital accumulation abstract using a two country dynamic optimization model with capital accumulation we explore the effect of such supply side changes as a rise in productivity and a reduction in the corporate tax rate on the equilibrium path and the welfare of two countries the welfare effect consists of a tax distortion term and a wealth term those supply side changes in the creditor country increase its welfare but unambiguously decrease the debtor country s welfare as capital moves from the debtor country to the creditor country

growth versus welfare in a model of nonrival infrastructure abstract the paper constructs a model of endogenous growth where infrastructure acts as an accumulable stock generating a nonrival input service steady state growth paths are studied for market and command economies in the former a final good is produced privately and as in many developing economies infrastructure accumulated on noncompetitive basis by the state the command economy allocates resources by solving a grand optimization exercise the transitionally stable steady growth rate for the market economy dominates the command economy growth rate due to the joint presence of noncompetitive behaviour by the state and noninternalizable externalities

budget balance welfare and the growth rate dynamic scoring of the long run government budget this paper determines conditions under which a reduction in the role of government either through a tax cut alone or together with accompanying expenditure cuts will improve long run government fiscal balance for a ceteris paribus cut in the income tax rate to improve long run government balance the intertemporal elasticity of substitution must exceed unity a tax cut balanced by an expenditure cut is likely to improve the long run balance even if it does not improve the short run balance the relationship between improving the long run fiscal balance and economic welfare is also analyzed

infrastructure provision and macroeconomic performance this paper studies the differences between private and government provision of infrastructure capital utilization decisions and their differential role in determining market prices for capital goods under the two regimes of infrastructure provision serve as a critical transmission mechanism for fiscal policy a subsidy to private providers of infrastructure is preferable to direct government provision irrespective of how the subsidy or expenditure is financed the case for private provision is much stronger in economies characterized by high levels of congestion the choice between private and government provision also has a crucial effect on the design of optimal fiscal policy 2011 elsevier b v all rights reserved

public investment congestion and private capital accumulation this paper analyses the impact of public investment on the dynamics of private capital formation in an intertemporal optimising market clearing framework the key feature characterising the analysis is that the public good is treated as a durable capital good subject to congestion we show how in the presence of congestion the effect of government investment on private capital formation involves a tradeoff between the degree of substitution between private and public capital in production and the degree of congestion both lump sum and distortionary tax financing are considered with this tradeoff being tightened in the latter case

capital utilization economic growth and convergence abstract optimal decisions by economic agents regarding the utilization of capital lead to empirically plausible speeds of convergence in one sector models of economic growth the relationship between depreciation and capital utilization plays a crucial role in slowing down convergence to the steady state cross country differences in the extent to which the capital utilization decision is internalized along the transition path may lead to differences in convergence rates even for countries with similar initial and terminal conditions finally by assuming a constant depreciation rate and full capital utilization standard growth models may be overstating the magnitude of the steady state equilibrium

is public expenditure productive abstract this paper considers the relationship between aggregate productivity and stock and flow government spending variables the empirical results indicate that i the nonmilitary public capital stock is dramatically more important in determining productivity than is either the flow of nonmilitary or military spending ii military capital bears little relation to productivity and iii a core infrastructure of streets highways airports mass transit sewers water systems etc has most explanatory power for productivity the paper also suggests an important role for the net public capital stock in the productivity slowdown of the last fifteen years

excludable and non excludable public inputs consequences for economic growth non excludable and excludable public inputs are introduced into an endogenous growth model we derive the equilibrium growth rate and design the optimal tax and user cost structure emphasizing the role of congestion and its consequences for the government s budget the latter comprises fee and tax revenues that are used to finance the public inputs although they may generate insufficient revenue to do so entirely we extend the model to allow for monopoly pricing of the user fee by the government most of the analysis is conducted for general production functions consistent with endogenous growth but the ces technology is also considered a vast literature has evolved emphasizing the role of public investment as a determinant of economic growth among the earliest contributions arrow and kurz 1970 is particularly significant while the seminal work of barro 1990 has been especially influential with respect to the contemporary endogenous growth literature stimulated by aschauer s 1989 findings pertaining to the high rate of return on public capital several authors have explored various aspects of the role of public capital in stimulating economic growth for example baxter and king 1993 and fisher and turnovsky 1998 examine the interaction between public and private capital in a ramsey type growth model while futagami et al 1993 perform a similar type of analysis in an endogenous growth context glomm and ravikumar 1997 analyse the growth effects of productive public spending in an overlapping generations setup extending the framework to include majority voting and alternative compositions of publicly provided goods and services they also indicate private alternatives to public provision but do not pursue this in detail cassou and lansing 1998 focus on the relationship between private and public capital showing how the evolution of the ratio between the two in the us economy since 1925 is broadly consistent with the predictions of a simple ramsey growth model they also show how the productivity slowdown in the us economy since the 1970s is more likely due to increasing tax rates than to non optimal public investment policy much of the literature including barro treats the public input as a pure public good freely available without restrictions or impediments to all agents in the economy but the public goods literature identifies many different characteristics that most public goods in fact exhibit notably the presence of rivalry and or excludability see e g cornes and sandler 1996 thus the treatment of a public

reprint to infrastructure provision and macroeconomic performance abstract this paper studies the differences between private and government provision of infrastructure capital utilization decisions and their differential role in determining market prices for capital goods under the two regimes of infrastructure provision serve as a critical transmission mechanism for fiscal policy a subsidy to private providers of infrastructure is preferable to direct government provision irrespective of how the subsidy or expenditure is financed the case for private provision is much stronger in economies characterized by high levels of congestion the choice between private and government provision also has a crucial effect on the design of optimal fiscal policy

optimal taxation of capital income in general equilibrium with infinite lives this paper analyzes the optimal tax on capital income in general equilibrium models of the second best agents have infinite lives and utility functions which are extensions from the koopmans form the population is heterogeneous the important property of the models is the equality between the social and the private discount rates in the long run i find that the optimal tax rate is zero in the long run for a special case of additively separable utility functions i then determine the tax rates along the dynamic path and conditions that are sufficient for the local stability of the steady state

the composition of government expenditure and its consequences for macroeconomic performance abstract this paper employs the intertemporal optimizing market clearing framework to compare the effects of government consumption expenditure and government infrastructure expenditure on macroeconomic adjustment and performance particular attention is focused on the time path of the capital stock and its adjustment to both permanent and temporary changes in government expenditure are considered we show how the effects of both forms of government expenditure on economic welfare can be broken down into 1 i a direct crowding out effect and 2 ii a second component which describes the intertemporal tradeoffs between the short run rate of capital accumulation and the resulting change in the capital stock

explaining demand for green electricity using data from all u s utilities abstract green electricity programs enable households to voluntarily contribute to the development of renewable electricity by purchasing green electricity through their local utility using a dataset of all utilities in the united states this paper explores the utility consumer and program characteristics that influence participation levels in green electricity as well as whether a utility chooses to offer a program among other results we find that the key determinants of program participation are the education of the consumer base and the affordability of the green electricity program our results enhance understanding of private provision of environmental public goods and could aid in ex ante evaluations of whether a green electricity program is likely to cover its administrative costs or be a cost effective way of improving environmental quality

dynamic analysis of an endogenous growth model with public capital this paper develops an endogenous growth model with productive public capital along with private capital in a spirit similar to that of r j barro 1990 since the authors model includes two stock variables it has transitional dynamics unlike most of the previous studies on endogenous growth including barro s where concerns are restricted to the steady state analysis first they show that the transitional path is unique and stable second the character of the transitional path is explored third the authors show that the optimal tax rate is smaller than the rate that maximizes the national growth rate with a log linear utility function copyright 1993 by the editors of the scandinavian journal of economics

indeterminacy and endogenous growth with social constant returns abstract by examining endogenous growth models with physical and human capital this paper demonstrates that indeterminacy of equilibrium may emerge even in the absence of increasing returns to scale the model we examine consists of two production sectors one produces final goods and the other produces new human capital both sectors use physical as well as human capital it is assumed that while the private technology of the representative firm in each sector exhibits decreasing returns to scale the social technologies of both sectors satisfy constant returns because of the presence of sector specific externalities we demonstrate that a small divergence between private and social factor intensity conditions generates indeterminacy of equilibrium rather easily even under constant returns intuitive implications of the source of indeterminacy and a generalization of the model are also presented journal of economic literature classification numbers d90 o40 o41