WHEN I left graduate school, in 1963, I believed that the single most desirable change in the
US tax structure would be the taxation of capital gains as ordinary income. I now believe that …

Publisher Summary This chapter examines local and global approximation methods that
have been used or have potential future value in economic and econometric analysis. The …

Peter Lindert inquires as to whether social policies that redistribute income impose
constraints on economic growth. Although taxes and transfers have been debated for …

We investigate the redistributive potential of capital taxation in an intertemporal maximizing
model of capital formation. First, even unanticipated redistributive capital taxation is severely …

Macroeconomics was born as a distinct field in the 1940's, as a part of the intellectual
response to the Great Depression. The term then referred to the body of knowledge and …

Why do the countries of the world display considerable disparity in long-term growth rates?
This paper examines the hypothesis that the answer lies in differences in national public …

We study the problem of optimal taxation in three infinite-horizon, representative-agent
endogenous growth models. The first model is a convex model in which physical and human …

Our aim in this paper is to exposit a convex model of equilibrium growth. The model has two
features that distinguish it from most other work on the subject: first, that the model is convex …

I present new estimates of the elasticity of substitution between capital and labor using data
from the private sector of the US economy for the period 1948-1998. I first adopt Berndt's …

Prescott (1986) estimates that technology shocks account for 75% of the fluctuations in the
postwar US economy. This paper reestimates the contribution of technological change for a …