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We provide a unified framework with demand for housing over the life cycle and financial frictions to analyze the existence and macroeconomic effects of rational housing bubbles. We distinguish a housing price bubble, defined as the difference between the housing market price and its fundamental value, from a housing demand bubble, which corresponds to a situation where a pure speculative housing demand exists. In an overlapping generation exchange economy, we show that no housing price bubble occurs. However, a housing demand bubble may occur, generating a boom in housing prices and a drop in the interest rate, when households face a binding borrowing constraint. Multiplicity of steady states and endogenous fluctuations can occur when credit market imperfections are moderate. These fluctuations involve transitions between equilibria with and without a housing demand bubble that generate large fluctuations in housing prices consistent with observed patterns. We finally extend the basic framework to a production economy and we show that a housing demand bubble increases the housing price, housing price to income ratio and economic growth.

When habits are introduced multiplicatively in a capital accumulation model, the consumers' objective function might fail to be concave. In this paper we provide conditions aimed at guaranteeing the existence of interior solutions to the consumers' problem. We also characterize the equilibrium path of two growth models with multiplicative habits: the internal habit formation model, where individual habits coincide with own past consumption, and the external habit formation (or catching-up with the Joneses) model, where habits arise from the average past consumption in the economy. We show that the introduction of external habits makes the equilibrium path inefficient during the transition towards the balanced growth path. We characterize in this context the optimal tax policy.

We analyze the dynamic behavior and the welfare properties of the equilibrium path of a growth model where both habits and consumption externalities affect the utility of consumers. We discuss the effects of flat rate income taxes and characterize the optimal income taxation policy. We show that, when consumption externalities and habit adjusted consumption are not perfect substitutes, a counter-cyclical income tax rate allows the competitive equilibrium to replicate the efficient path. Our analysis highlights the crucial role played by complementarities between externalities and habits in order to generate an inefficient dynamic equilibrium.

We analyze the transitional dynamics of a model with heterogeneous consumption goods. In this model, convergence is driven by two different forces: the typical diminishing returns to capital and the sectoral change inducing the variation in relative prices. We show that this second force affects the growth rate if the two consumption goods are not Edgeworth independent and if these two goods are produced with technologies exhibiting different capital intensities. Because the afore mentioned dynamic sectoral change arises only under heterogeneous consumption goods, the transitional dynamics of this model exhibits striking differences with the growth model with a single consumption good. We also show that these differences in the transitional dynamics can give raise to large discrepancies in the welfare cost of shocks between the economy with a unique consumption good and the economy with multiple consumption goods.

This paper analyses the e¤ects on employment of increasing the stock of public capital. To this end, we derive a wage equation so that wages are endogenized. This allows us to show that, by means of a higher elasticity of labour demand with respect to wages, a rise in public capital increases employment. The estimation of a structural model for the Spanish private sector tests and con…rms empirically this relationship. The results show that an increase in public capital has a significant and positive direct influence on employment, and indirect e¤ects derived from lower wages and higher economic growth. Finally, we undertake a simulation exercise to assess the long run efects on employment and economic growth of increasing public capital.

Labor productivity differences between developing and developed countries are much larger in agriculture than in non-agriculture. We show that cross-country differences in agricultural composition explain a substantial part of labor productivity differences. To this end, we group agricultural products into two sectors that are differentiated only by capital intensity. As the economy develops and capital accumulates, the price of labor-intensive agricultural goods relative to capital-intensive agricultural goods increases. This price change drives a process of structural change that shifts land and farmers to the capital-intensive sector, increasing labor productivity in agriculture. We illustrate this mechanism using a multisector growth model that generates transitional dynamics consistent with patterns of structural change observed in Brazil and other developing countries, and with cross-country differences in agricultural composition and labor productivity. Finally, we show that taxes and regulations that create a misallocation of inputs within agriculture also reduce the relative labor productivity.

We observe the following patterns in the US economy during the period 1965-2015: (i) the rise of the service sector, (ii) the increase in leisure time, and (iii) the increase in recreational services. To display the last pattern, we measure the fraction of the value added of the service sector explained by the consumption of recreational services, and we show that it increases during this period. We explain these three patterns of structural change in a multisector growth model, where leisure time and the consumption of recreational services are complements. We show that this complementarity introduces a mechanism of structural change that contributes to explain the rise of the service sector and that al so affects the labor supply. We measure the reduction in employment due to a tax increase to illustrate the effect on the labor supply of this mechanism

As it is documented, investment of households in human capital is negatively related to the number of children individuals will have and requires some loans to be financed. We show that this negative relationship contributes to explain episodes of bubbles that are associated to higher growth rates. This conclusion is obtained in an overlapping generations model where agents choose to invest in a productive asset, that can be interpreted as human capital, and decide their number of children. A bubble allows to smooth consumption and expenses over the life-cycle, and can therefore be used to finance either productive investment or the cost of rearing children. The time cost of rearing children plays a key role in the analysis. If the time cost per child is sufficiently large, households have only a small number of children. The bubble then has a crowding-in effect because it is used to finance productive investment. On the contrary, if the time cost per child is low enough, households have a large number of children. Then, the bubble is mainly used to finance the total cost of rearing children and has a crowding-out effect on investment. Therefore, the new mechanism we highlight shows that a bubble enhances growth only if the economy is characterized by a high rearing time cost per child.

We characterize several possible mechanisms of structural change by using a general multisector growth model, where preferences and technologies are not parameterized. In this generic set up, we derive the growth rates of sectoral employment shares at the equilibrium. We find that the economic fundamentals governing structural change in the sectoral employment shares are: (i) the income elasticities of the demand for consumption goods; (ii) the Allen-Uzawa elasticities of substitution between consumption goods; (iii) the capital income shares in sectoral outputs; and (iv) the elasticity of substitution between capital and labor in each sector. These fundamentals determine the effect that the growth rates of aggregate income, relative prices, rental rates and technological progress have on structural change. Finally, we estimate the aforementioned fundamentals to develop an accounting exercise that quantifies the contribution of each mechanism to the U.S. structural change.

In this paper, we build a model that, according to the empirical evidence, gives raise to oscillations in wealth within a dynasty while keeping intergenerational persistence in education attainment. The mechanism that we propose is based on the interaction between effort and wealth suggested by the Carnegie effect, according to which wealthier individuals make less effort than the poorer. The oscillations in wealth arise from changes in the effort exerted by different generations as a response to both inherited wealth and college premium. Our mechanism generates a rich social stratification with several classes in the long run as a consequence of the combination of different levels of education and effort. Furthermore, we generate a large mobility in wealth among classes even in the long run. Our model highlights the role played by the minimum cost on education investment, the borrowing constraints, and the complementarity between effort and education.