Related papers: Can we predict long-run economic growth?
It is widely assumed that increases in economic productivity necessarily lead to economic growth. In this paper, it is shown that this is not always the case. An idealized model of an economy is presented in which a new technology allows…
A successful response to climate change needs vast investments in low-carbon research, energy, and sustainable development. Governments can drive research, provide environmental regulation, and accelerate global development, but the…
The aim here is to address the origins of sustainability for the real growth rate in the United States. For over a century of observations on the real GDP per capita of the United States a sustainable two percent growth rate has been…
One of the major pillars of modern cosmology theory is a period of accelerating expansion in the early universe. This accelerating expansion, or inflation, must be sustained for at least 30 e--foldings. One mechanism used to drive the…
In this paper, we analyze the long-term distributive impact of climate change through rising food prices. We use a standard incomplete markets model and account for non-linear Engel curves for food consumption. For the calibration of our…
I discuss the current status of inflationary cosmology in light of the recent WMAP 3-year data release. The basic predictions of inflation are all supported by the data. Inflation also makes predictions which have not been well tested by…
It is already understood that the increasing observational evidence for an open Universe may be reconciled with inflation if our horizon is contained inside one single huge bubble nucleated during the inflationary phase transition. In the…
Quantum gravitational back-reaction offers the potential of simultaneously resolving the problem of the cosmological constant and providing a natural model of inflation in which scalars play no special role. In this model inflation begins…
We consider eternal inflation in hilltop-type inflation models, favored by current data, in which the scalar field in inflation rolls off of a local maximum of the potential. Unlike chaotic or plateau-type inflation models, in hilltop…
Current evidence suggests that the cosmological constant is not zero, or that we live in an open universe. We examine the implications for the future under these assumptions, and find that they are striking. If the Universe is cosmological…
The concepts of Gross Domestic Product (GDP), GDP per capita, and population are central to the study of political science and economics. However, a growing literature suggests that existing measures of these concepts contain considerable…
Two extensions of ideas lying in the basis of the inflationary scenario of the early Universe and their effect on the large scale structure of the present-day Universe are discussed. The first of them is the possibility of fast phase…
The effects of saving and spending patterns on holding time distribution of money are investigated based on the ideal gas-like models. We show the steady-state distribution obeys an exponential law when the saving factor is set uniformly,…
Increasing agricultural productivity is a gradual process with significant time lags between research and development (R&D) investment and the resulting gains. We estimate the response of US agricultural Total Factor Productivity (TFP) to…
The average and median income dependence on work experience and time is analyzed and modeled for the USA. The original data set providing the mean and median income estimates in 10 year long intervals spans a long time period of almost 35…
Social and economic inequality is a plague of the XXI Century. It is continuously widening, as the wealth of a relatively small group increases and, therefore, the rest of the world shares a shrinking fraction of resources. This situation…
Observations of the cosmic microwave sky are revealing the primordial non-uniformities from which all structure in the Universe grew. The only known physical mechanism for generating the inhomogeneities we see involves the amplification of…
We consider the problem of optimal consumption from labor income and investment in a general incomplete semimartingale market. The economic agent cannot borrow against future income, so the total wealth is required to be positive at (all or…
The Fourth Industrial Revolution commonly refers to the accelerating technological transformation that has been taking place in the 21st century. Economic growth theories which treat the accumulation of knowledge and its effect on…
The cosmological model best capable of fitting current observational data features two separate epochs during which the Universe is accelerating. During the earliest stages of the Universe, such acceleration is known as cosmological…