Copyright (c) 2008 Berkeley Electronic Press All rights reserved. http://www.bepress.com/bejm Recent documents in The B.E. Journal of Macroeconomics en-us Sun, 14 Sep 2008 06:18:35 PDT 3600 http://www.bepress.com/bejm/vol8/iss1/art25 http://www.bepress.com/bejm/vol8/iss1/art25 Fri, 12 Sep 2008 11:31:11 PDT This paper studies the Japanese depression in the interwar period using the business cycle accounting methodology and a general equilibrium model with time-varying markups. I find that the initial slowdown of the economy can be explained by a decline in productivity. However, I also find that when only productivity change is taken into account, a prototype neoclassical growth model predicts that in the 1930s, output recovers more rapidly than is actually supported by the data. Using restrictions from theory, I quantify the contribution of an increase in markups in the manufacturing and mining sectors and find that a substantial fraction of the weak recovery can be explained by this factor. I argue that this increase in markups is caused by government-promoted cartelization. Hikaru Saijo E32 N15 N45 http://www.bepress.com/bejm/vol8/iss1/art24 http://www.bepress.com/bejm/vol8/iss1/art24 Mon, 08 Sep 2008 12:35:51 PDT This paper develops a human-capital-based endogenous growth scenario in which an economy initially produces the agricultural good, characterized by diminishing returns to scale, then produces `traditional manufacturing' under constant-returns and finally produces `modern manufacturing' under increasing-returns. Transition dates are endogenous and depend on the non-essentiality of the industrial goods in preferences and fixed costs in the technology of the modern manufacturing. Each transition is followed by a jump in the long-run growth rate of real income. The theoretical model is calibrated to U.S. historical data. It `predicts' the first transition to occur around 1820s and the second transition to happen around 1900. Rudrani Bhattacharya O11 O14 O41