William J. Baumol is the 2003 winner of the International Award for Entrepreneurship and Small Business Research. Throughout his career Baumol has urged the profession to pay attention to the instrumental role of entrepreneurship in economic renewal and growth. At the same time he has insisted...

This paper shows that whether natural resources are good or bad for a country's development depends crucially on the interaction between institutional setting and the type of resources that the country possesses. Some natural resources are for economical and technical reasons more likely to...

According to the classical view, an economy's lender of last resort should be its central bank. For brief periods of time, the bank might suspend convertibility in order to provide the liquidity needed to support the domestic credit market. Recent experience of financial crises demonstrates the...

This paper examines the implications of income redistribution on human capital accumulation and income inequality, presenting a model where human capital investment is indivisible and agents differ in economic opportunity as well as intellectual ability. It is shown that the impact of...

This paper reconsiders the classical problem of majority voting over tax schedules, adding the possibility to avoid taxes. In this setting preferences over tax schedules are not determined by earned income, but rather by taxable income, which depends on the joint decisions of labor supply and...

New Keynesian models of monetary policy assign no role to monetary aggregates, in the sense that the level of output, prices, and interest rates can be determined without knowledge of the quantity of money. We evaluate the empirical validity of this prediction by studying the effects of shocks...