A central policy issue in the battle against HIV in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) is whether and when high-prevalence countries might become autonomous in designing and implementing their own intervention policies against the disease. The aim of this research is twofold. First, it develops a framework for explaining economic development in a general equilibrium growth model with endogenous fertility and endogenous mortality forced by the threat of a persistent, deadly infectious disease, such as HIV/AIDS in SSA. Second, it aims to shed light on the interplay between foreign aid and endogenous domestic public policies in SSA countries severely afflicted by HIV. Consequently, it investigates the demographic and macroeconomic implications of an intervention against HIV/AIDS whose total amount is the sum of an exogenous component representing foreign aid and an endogenous public expenditure. On the assumption that these policies allow the same degree of HIV control, we show the emergence of quite different responses in terms of key demo-economic variables. These effects mainly pass through the fertility response to the evolving epidemic conditions.

This paper examines how innovation-led growth affects optimal monetary policy. We consider the Ramsey policy in a New Keynesian model where R&D leads to an expanding variety of intermediate goods and compare the results with those obtained when the expansion occurs exogenously. Positive trend inflation is found to be optimal under both assumptions, but much higher with profit-seeking innovation. Optimal monetary policy must be counter-cyclical in response to both technology and public spending shocks, yet the intensity of the reaction crucially depends on the presence of an R&D sector. However, the small amount of short-run deviations of prices from the non-zero trend inflation observed in response to shocks suggests inflation targeting as a robust policy recommendation.

This paper investigates the effects of monetary policy on long-run economic growth via different cash-in-advance (CIA) constraints on R&D in a Schumpeterian growth model with vertical and horizontal innovations. The relationship between inflation and growth is contingent on the relative extents of CIA constraints and diminishing returns to two types of innovation. This model can generate a mixed (monotonic or non-monotonic) relationship between inflation and growth, given that the relative strength of monetary effects on growth between different CIA constraints and that of R&D-labor-reallocation effects between different diminishing returns vary with the nominal interest rate. In the empirically relevant case where horizontal R&D is subject to larger diminishing returns than vertical R&D, inflation and growth can exhibit an inverted-U relationship when the CIA constraint on horizontal R&D is sufficiently larger than that on vertical R&D. Finally, we calibrate the model to the US economy and find that the growth-maximizing rate of inflation is around 2.4%, which is consistent with the recent empirical estimates.

The paper presents an agent-based model reproducing a stylized credit network that evolves endogenously through the individual choices of firms and banks. We introduce in this framework a financial stability authority in order to test the effects of different prudential policy measures designed to improve the resilience of the economic system. Simulations show that a combination of micro- and macroprudential policies reduces systemic risk but at the cost of increasing banks’ capital volatility. Moreover, the agent-based methodology allows us to implement an alternative meso regulatory framework that takes into consideration the connections between firms and banks. This policy targets only the more connected banks, increasing their capital requirement in order to reduce the diffusion of local shocks. Our results support the idea that the mesoprudential policy is able to reduce systemic risk without affecting the stability of banks’ capital structure.

This paper develops an endogenous growth model with doubly differentiated R&D being the growth engine. The model incorporates dynamic structural change and heterogeneous knowledge spillovers. As a result, decentralized economy may exhibit non-monotonic growth paths and declining R&D productivity. Conditions on the knowledge spillover operator granting the existence of balanced growth for first-best and market economies are obtained. Different regulation tools helpful in achieving the sustainable path and their limits are studied.

We evaluate the global macroeconomic effects of cross-country-coordinated fiscal and monetary policies to counterbalance secular stagnation by simulating a five-region New Keynesian model of the world economy, calibrated to the United States (US), the euro area, Japan, China, and the rest of the world. The model includes investment in research and development (R&D) as a key factor affecting global growth. Our main findings are as follows. First, unfavorable technology developments may have played a nontrivial role in the global growth slowdown. Second, secular stagnation can be more effectively counterbalanced by coordinating global fiscal and monetary measures encouraging R&D accumulation. Third, these coordinated measures provide a larger welfare gain relative to a unilateral fiscal expansion.

We study an impact of the financial intermediation on economic growth. We assume the simple model of the economic growth in the form of an autonomous dynamical system with a financial sector represented by banks and real sector represented by households and firms. We assume that financial intermediation services are described by financial intermediation technology which is a function depending on the share of labor employed by banks. Investments realized by firms depend not only on savings accumulated by banks but also on financial intermediation technology. We obtain a three-dimensional dynamical system and analyze the existence of a saddle equilibrium in the growth process associated with financial intermediation. Using mathematical methods of dynamical systems, we analyze growth paths, and we study the stationary states of the system and their stability. We found that equilibrium is reached only by trajectories located on two submanifolds. The resulting analysis provides an insight into the saddle solution with a stable incoming separatrix lying on one of the invariant manifolds.

We provide aggregate macroeconomic evidence on how, in the long run, a diverse degree of complexity in production may affect not only the rate of economic growth, but also the correlation between the latter, population growth and the monopolistic (intermediate) markups. For a sample of Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries, we find that the impact of population change on economic growth is slightly positive. According to our theoretical model, this implies that the losses due to more complexity in production are lower than the corresponding specialization gains. Using a finite mixture model, we also classify the countries in the sample and verify for each cluster the impact that the population growth rate and the intermediate sector’s markups exert on the 5-year average real gross domestic product (GDP) growth rate.