Competition and Growth in a Vintage Knowledge Model

This paper models the relationship between growth, technology-lifetime, entry, and competition in a vintage-knowledge model of endogenous growth and perfect competition. The model has a unique steady state REE equilibrium. Variations of R&D-efficiency lead to a negative relation between growth and vintage-lifetime and indicate a non-monotonic relation between growth and competition. A shift of population size and its growth rates have qualitatively different consequences here than in standard models. The extent of entry constitutes a buffer, neutralizing the effect of population size or population growth rates on per-capita income levels and growth rates.Endogenous Growth, Vintage-Model, Perfect Competition

History-Dependent Individual Behavior, Polarization, and Pareto-Improving Activating Welfare

This paper assumes that human capital not only generates market incomes but is a direct source of utility as well. In an otherwise standard framework it is shown that the interaction between human capital and effort in raising human capital and in generating utility naturally leads to history-dependent optimal individual behavior. Depending on the initial distribution of skills, this history-dependence divides each group of otherwise identical households into two perpetually separated groups: one rich and educated, the other poor and uneducated. If the rich have a common interest in the education of the poor (for instance financing public goods), such polarized equilibria are typically Pareto-inefficient. While unconditional transfers only reduce the incentives of the uneducated to accumulate skills, it is shown that there exist activating tax-transfer systems that Pareto-dominate any non-redistributing tax-system and involve a negative marginal income tax on household income below a certain threshold.

Inflation and Innovation-driven Growth

This paper models the relationship between inflation and steady state growth in a model combining standard Schumpeterian growth with a standard New Keynesian specification of nominal price rigidity. Positive money growth has two clear-cut countervailing effects on the incentive to innovate. Past price rigidity causes the use of an inefficiently large quantity of cheap old intermediate goods, reducing demand for new ones and hence, the incentive to innovate. Future price rigidity erodes the new good’s relative price, increasing demand and therefore the current incentive to innovate. In numerical calibrations the negative effect of inflation on growth dominates.Inflation, endogenous growth, price rigidity

Short-term price rigidity in an endogenous growth model: Non-Superneutrality and a non-vertical long-term Phillips-curve

This model analyses the interaction between inflation and the long-run levels of employment and output growth in a Schumpeterian growth model with quality improving innovations under nominal price rigidity. At the unique REE steady state equilibrium, both employment and growth are hump-shaped functions of money growth peaking at positive inflation rates. This is due to four effects of money growth under rigidity: Erosion of its relative price through inflation and the optimal initial mark-up set in anticipation of this influence a firm’s profits. Dispersion in relative prices causes inefficient production while the change in the average mark-up influences aggregate demand.Inflation, price rigidity, endogenous growth, employment, long-run Phillips curve

Theoretical issues in the interpretation of Cappadocian, a not-so-dead Greek contact language

Cappadocian is a mixed Greek-Turkish dialect continuum spoken in the Turkish Central Anatolia Region until the population exchange between Greece and Turkey in the 1920s. Only a few Cappadocian dialects are still spoken in present-day Greece. Since the publication of Thomason and Kaufman’s Language Contact, Creolization, and Genetic Linguistics in 1988, Cappadocian has attracted the attention of historical and contact linguists, because of its unique mixed character. In this paper, I will discuss a number of theoretical issues in the interpretation of the linguistic structure of Cappadocian, focusing on the following topics: (1) the status of loan phonemes and loan morphemes in contact languages, (2) the distinction between code switching and code mixing in relation to Poplack’s Free Morpheme Constraint, (3) the schizoid typology of contact languages

The Poverty of Growth with Interdependent Utility Functions

We argue that with interdependent utility functions growth can lead to a decline in total welfare of a society if the gains from growth are sufficiently unequally distributed in the presence of negative externalities, i.e., envy.interdependent utility functions, growth, inequality

A Church to Surpass All Churches : Manichaeism as a Test Case for the Theory of Reception

En vue de tester la viabilité de la théorie de la réception pour l’étude du manichéisme, cette étude examine comment l’effort manichéen d’établir des liens culturels et linguistiques dans les milieux où s’exerça la mission manichéenne n’a pas suffi à assurer le maintien de la Religion de Lumière. Le fait que Mani considérait sa révélation comme supérieure aux autres a au contraire empêché sa réception par les cultures chez lesquelles elle voulait être accueillie.In order to test the utility of the theory of reception for the study of Manichaeism, this paper examines how Manichaean efforts to establish cultural and linguistic continuities in their various missionary environments were not enough to sustain the Religion of Light. Instead, the fact that Mani considered his revelation as superior to others ultimately seems to have hindered its reception by a variety of host cultures