Robert J Barros
Biographic Data
| ID | 304392 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Robert J Barros |
| GIVEN NAMES | Robert J |
| FAMILY NAME | Barros |
| SIGNATURE | BARROS R J |
| AFFILIATIONS | Harvard University Press |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-3761-827X |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 73 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 2996 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 73 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1970 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 17 |
Fiscal influences on inflation in oecd countries, 2020–2023
The fiscal theory of the price level has been active for thirty years, and the interest in this theory grew with the recent global surges in inflation and government spending. A related idea from Lucas and Stokey is that inflation during wartime (or an analogous global emergency such as the COVID pandemic) can be an efficient form of state-contingent public finance. This study applies these ideas to the recent inflation in thirty-seven Organisati…
Vaccination rates and Covid outcomes across U.S. states
Safe Assets
This paper investigates the quantity of safe assets. First, we estimate that the average safe-asset ratio (ratio of safe to total assets) in 34 OECD countries was 37% in 2015. Further, we document that this ratio is relatively stable over time. Second, we build a heterogeneous-agent model with rare disasters and risk aversion coefficients that accounts for (i) the average level of the safe-asset ratio; (ii) the stability of this ratio over time; …
Islam and Economic Growth
Islam's ultimate aim for Muslims is to render Muslims to achieve the salvation (falah) in afterlife as well as their temporary life in earth. A moderate welfare in this life is required for Muslims in order for them to fulfil their responsibilities in terms of their personal religious life. What is meant by a moderate economic life standard is that the welfare of the entire society should not be accumulated in some certain classes of the society,…
Double-Counting of Investment
The national-income accounts double-count investment, which enters once when it occurs and again in present value as rental income on added capital. The double-counting implies that GDP and national income overstate sustainable consumption. An alternative measure, ‘permanent income,’ equals consumption in the steady state but deviates from consumption outside of the steady state because expensing of gross investment applies to the long-run flow, …
Double Counting of Investment
The national-income accounts double-count investment, which enters once when it occurs and again in present value as rental income on added capital. The double counting implies that GDP and national income overstate sustainable consumption. An alternative measure, ‘permanent income’, equals consumption in the steady state but deviates from consumption outside of the steady state because expensing of gross investment applies to the long-run flow, …
The Coronavirus and the Great Influenza Pandemic: Lessons from the “Spanish Flu” for the Coronavirus’s Potential Effects on Mortality and Economic Activity
Mortality and economic contraction during the 1918-1920 Great Influenza Pandemic provide plausible upper bounds for outcomes under the coronavirus (COVID-19). Data for 48 countries imply flu-related deaths in 1918-1920 of 40 million, 2.1 percent of world population, implying 150 million deaths when applied to current population. Regressions with annual information on flu deaths 1918-1920 and war deaths during WWI imply flu-generated economic decl…
Religion and Economic Growth
Empirical research on the determinants of economic growth has typically neglected the influence of religion.To fill this gap, we use international survey data on religiosity for a broad panel of countries to investigate the effects of church attendance and religious beliefs on economic growth.To isolate the direction of causation from religiosity to economic performance, we use instrumental variables suggested by our analysis of systems in which …
The Wealth of Religions: The Political Economy of Believing and Belonging
Transplantation of bioengineered rat lungs recellularized with endothelial and adipose-derived stromal cells
Bioengineered lungs consisting of a decellularized lung scaffold that is repopulated with a patient’s own cells could provide desperately needed donor organs in the future. This approach has been tested in rats, and has been partially explored in porcine and human lungs. However, existing bioengineered lungs are fragile, in part because of their immature vascular structure. Herein, we report the application of adipose-derived stem/stromal cells (…
Saints Marching In, 1590–2012
The Catholic Church has been making saints for centuries in the two‐stage process of beatification and canonization. We analyse determinants of numbers beatified and canonized (non‐martyrs) since 1590 across seven world regions. The number beatified is roughly proportional to a pope's tenure and a region's Catholic population, responds positively since the early 20th century to Catholic–Protestant competition and to secularization, and falls afte…
Gold Returns
From 1836 to 2011, gold's average annual real rate of price change is 1.1%, with a standard deviation of 13.1% and a negligible covariance with consumption growth. Because gold does not serve as a hedge against macroeconomic declines, its expected real rate of return should be close to the risk‐free rate of around 1%. These properties fit an asset‐pricing model with rare disasters and a high elasticity of substitution between gold services and or…
Switching antipsychotic medication to aripiprazole: Position paper by a panel of Italian psychiatrists
Few studies have addressed the indications for antipsychotic switching and the best practical strategies to achieve the desired goal in the clinical practice setting. Studies on antipsychotic switching should clarify why, when and how a switch should be done. The results should standardize the reasons for switching an antipsychotic, assess the optimal time to switch and evaluate the best ways to switch. Both clinical and pharmacological factors s…
Education Matters: Global Schooling Gains from the 19th to the 21st Century
In the past half century, human capital has emerged as one of the most active areas of research in economics. This book's efforts at constructing useful measures of educational attainment for a broad panel of countries go back 20 years. It extends earlier work by presenting and discussing a new long-term data set on educational attainment of the population for 146 countries for the period from 1870 to 2010. In addition, it provides new data on ed…
Environmental Protection, Rare Disasters and Discount Rates
The Stern Review 's evaluation of environmental protection stresses low discount rates and uncertainty about environmental effects. An appropriate model for analysing this uncertainty and the associated discount rates requires sufficient risk aversion and fat‐tailed uncertainty to account for the observed equity premium. Calibrations based on Epstein–Zin preferences and existing analyses of rare macroeconomic disasters suggest that optimal enviro…
Convergence and Modernisation
In a country panel since 1960, the estimated annual convergence rate for GDP is 1.7%, conditional on time‐varying explanatory variables. With country fixed effects, the estimated convergence rate is misleadingly high. With data starting in 1870, country fixed effects are reasonable and the estimated convergence rate is 2.6%. Combining the two estimates suggests conditional convergence close to the ‘iron‐law’ rate of 2%. With post‐1960 data, estim…
Symposium on human capital and economic development: An introduction
A new data set of educational attainment in the world, 1950–2010
La crise des gouvernements et les crises de la finance et de l'économie
Macroeconomic Effects From Government Purchases and Taxes
For U.S. annual data that include World War II, the estimated multiplier for temporary defense spending is 0.4–0.5 contemporaneously and 0.6–0.7 over 2 years. If the change in defense spending is “permanent” (gauged by Ramey's defense news variable), the multipliers are higher by 0.1–0.2. Since all estimated multipliers are significantly less than 1, greater spending crowds out other components of GDP, particularly investment. The lack of good in…
The Economics of Sainthood (A Preliminary Investigation)
Saint making has been a major activity of the Roman Catholic Church for centuries. The pace of sanctifications has picked up noticeably in the past several decades under the most recent two popes, John Paul II and Benedict XVI. This article explores the economics of sainthood, applying social science reasoning to understand the Church's choices on numbers and characteristics of saints, gauged by the location and socioeconomic attributes of the pe…
A New Data Set of Educational Attainment in the World, 1950-2010
Our panel data set on educational attainment has been updated for 146 countries from 1950 to 2010. The data are disaggregated by sex and by 5-year age intervals. We have improved the accuracy of estimation by using information from consistent census data, disaggregated by age group, along with new estimates of mortality rates and completion rates by age and education level. We use these new data to investigate how output relates to the stock of h…
Una escogencia racional
Reseña
Religious Conversion in 40 Countries
Using data from the International Social Survey Program and the World Values Survey about current and former religious adherence, we calculate country-level religious-conversion rates for 40 countries. Drawing upon a theoretical model based on rational individual choice, we posit that the frequency of religious conversion depends on the cost of switching and the cost of having the “wrong” religion. Findings accord with several hypotheses: religio…
Private Voluntary Organizations Engaged in International Assistance, 1939-2004
U.S.-based private and voluntary organizations (PVOs) play an important role in international assistance. To assess this role, the authors constructed a new data set that covers more than 1,600 secular and religious PVOs that registered with the U.S. federal government between 1939 and 2004. In the post—World War II period, major revenue patterns are the rise of Evangelical PVOs, decline of Jewish PVOs, and rapid growth of secular PVOs from the m…
Convergence
A key economic issue is whether poor countries or regions tend to grow faster than rich ones: are there automatic forces that lead to convergence over time in the levels of per capita income and product? The authors use the neoclassical growth model as a framework to study convergence across the forty-eight contiguous U.S. states. They exploit data on personal income since 1840 and on gross state product since 1963. The U.S. states provide clear …
A new data set of educational attainment in the world, 1950–2010
Government Spending in a Simple Model of Endogeneous Growth
One strand of endogenous-growth models assumes constant returns to a broad concept of capital. I extend these models to include tax-financed government services that affect production or utility. Growth and saving rates fall with an increase in utility-type expenditures; the two rates rise initially with productive government expenditures but subsequently decline. With an income tax, the decentralized choices of growth and saving are "too low," b…
Are Government Bonds Net Wealth
Determinants of Democracy
(Article begins on next page) The Harvard community has made this article openly available. Please share how this access benefits you. Your story matters
Religion and Economic Growth across Countries
Empirical research on the determinants of economic growth typically neglects the influence of religion. To fill this gap, this study uses international survey data on religiosity for a broad panel of countries to investigate the effects of church attendance and religious beliefs on economic growth. To isolate the direction of causation from religiosity to economic performance, the estimation relies on instrumental variables suggested by an analys…
The control of politicians: An economic model
On the Determination of the Public Debt
A public debt theory is constructed in which the Ricardian invariance theorem is valid as a first-order proposition but where the dependence excess burden on the timing of taxation implies an optimal time path of debt issue. A central proposition is that deficits are varied in order to maintain expected constancy in tax rates. This behavior implies a positive effect on debt issue of temporary increases in government spending (as in wartime), a co…
A Positive Theory of Monetary Policy in a Natural Rate Model
A discretionary policymaker can create surprise inflation, which may reduce employment and raise government revenue. But when people understand the policymaker's objectives, these surprises cannot occur systematically. In equilibrium people form expectations rationally and the policymaker optimizes in each period, subject to the way that people form expectations. Then, we find that (1) the rates of monetary growth and inflation are excessive; (2)…
Religion and Economy
Religion has a two-way interaction with political economy. With religion viewed as a dependent variable, a central question is how economic development and political institutions affect religious participation and beliefs. With religion viewed as an independent variable, a key issue is how religiosity affects individual characteristics, such as work ethic, honesty, and thrift, and thereby influences economic performance. In this paper, we sketch …
Religion and Political Economy in an International Panel
Two important theories of religiosity are the secularization hypothesis and the religion-market model. According to the former, sometimes called a demand-side theory, economic development reduces religious participation and beliefs. According to the latter, described as a supply-side theory, religiosity depends on the presence of a state religion, regulation of the religion market, suppression of organized religion under Communism, and the degree…
Output Effects of Government Purchases
The theoretical analysis focuses on the distinction between temporary and permanent movements in government purchases. Under plausible conditions, the temporary case involves an output response that is positive, less than one-to-one with the change in government purchases, and larger than that generated by an equal-sized, but permanent, shift in purchase. The equilibrium real rate of return rise in the temporary case, but changes little in the pe…
Convergence and Modernisation
In a country panel since 1960, the estimated annual convergence rate for GDP is 1.7%, conditional on time‐varying explanatory variables. With country fixed effects, the estimated convergence rate is misleadingly high. With data starting in 1870, country fixed effects are reasonable and the estimated convergence rate is 2.6%. Combining the two estimates suggests conditional convergence close to the ‘iron‐law’ rate of 2%. With post‐1960 data, estim…
Religious Conversion in 40 Countries
Using data from the International Social Survey Program and the World Values Survey about current and former religious adherence, we calculate country-level religious-conversion rates for 40 countries. Drawing upon a theoretical model based on rational individual choice, we posit that the frequency of religious conversion depends on the cost of switching and the cost of having the “wrong” religion. Findings accord with several hypotheses: religio…
Unanticipated Money, Output, and the Price Level in the United States
(Article begins on next page) The Harvard community has made this article openly available. Please share how this access benefits you. Your story matters
Money and the Price Level Under the Gold Standard
Journal Article Money and the Price Level Under the Gold Standard Get access Robert J. Barro Robert J. Barro University of Rochester Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The Economic Journal, Volume 89, Issue 353, 1 March 1979, Pages 13–33, https://doi.org/10.2307/2231404 Published: 01 March 1979
Schooling Quality in a Cross-Section of Countries
We investigate the determinants of educational quality in a newly-constructed panel data set that includes output and input measures for a broad number of countries. The results show that family inputs and school resources are closely related to school outcomes, as measured by internationally comparable test scores, repetition rates, and drop-out rates. Family characteristics, such as income and education of parents, have strong effects on studen…
The Ricardian Approach to Budget Deficits
In recent years there has been a lot of discussion about U.S. budget deficits. Many economists and other observers have viewed these deficits as harmful to the U.S. and world economies. The supposed harmful effects include high real interest rates, low saving, low rates of economic growth, large current-account deficits in the United States and other countries with large budget deficits, and either a high or low dollar (depending apparently on th…
Recent Developments in the Theory of Rules Versus Discretion
Journal Article Recent Developments in the Theory of Rules Versus Discretion Get access Robert J. Barro Robert J. Barro University of Rochester Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The Economic Journal, Volume 96, Issue Supplement, 1 December 1986, Pages 23–37, https://doi.org/10.2307/2232967 Published: 01 December 1986
Saints Marching In, 1590–2012
The Catholic Church has been making saints for centuries in the two‐stage process of beatification and canonization. We analyse determinants of numbers beatified and canonized (non‐martyrs) since 1590 across seven world regions. The number beatified is roughly proportional to a pope's tenure and a region's Catholic population, responds positively since the early 20th century to Catholic–Protestant competition and to secularization, and falls afte…
Perceived Wealth in Bonds and Social Security and the Ricardian Equivalence Theorem: Reply to Feldstein and Buchanan
Inflationary Finance and the Welfare Cost of Inflation
On Uncertain Lifetimes
This paper contrasts consumer choice under uncertain lifetimes with the behavior that would arise if each individual's lifetime were announced at birth. In a model that includes life insurance and excludes investments in human capital, the expected utility under uncertain lifetimes exceeds that under known lifetimes when the latter expectation is based on preannouncement survival probabilities. This conclusion emerges, first, because the model wi…
Inflation, the Payments Period, and the Demand for Money
Gold Returns
From 1836 to 2011, gold's average annual real rate of price change is 1.1%, with a standard deviation of 13.1% and a negligible covariance with consumption growth. Because gold does not serve as a hedge against macroeconomic declines, its expected real rate of return should be close to the risk‐free rate of around 1%. These properties fit an asset‐pricing model with rare disasters and a high elasticity of substitution between gold services and or…
Inflation, the Payments Period, and the Demand for Money
Inflationary Finance and the Welfare Cost of Inflation
The control of politicians: An economic model
Are Government Bonds Net Wealth
Perceived Wealth in Bonds and Social Security and the Ricardian Equivalence Theorem: Reply to Feldstein and Buchanan
On Uncertain Lifetimes
This paper contrasts consumer choice under uncertain lifetimes with the behavior that would arise if each individual's lifetime were announced at birth. In a model that includes life insurance and excludes investments in human capital, the expected utility under uncertain lifetimes exceeds that under known lifetimes when the latter expectation is based on preannouncement survival probabilities. This conclusion emerges, first, because the model wi…
Unanticipated Money, Output, and the Price Level in the United States
(Article begins on next page) The Harvard community has made this article openly available. Please share how this access benefits you. Your story matters
On the Determination of the Public Debt
A public debt theory is constructed in which the Ricardian invariance theorem is valid as a first-order proposition but where the dependence excess burden on the timing of taxation implies an optimal time path of debt issue. A central proposition is that deficits are varied in order to maintain expected constancy in tax rates. This behavior implies a positive effect on debt issue of temporary increases in government spending (as in wartime), a co…
Money and the Price Level Under the Gold Standard
Journal Article Money and the Price Level Under the Gold Standard Get access Robert J. Barro Robert J. Barro University of Rochester Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The Economic Journal, Volume 89, Issue 353, 1 March 1979, Pages 13–33, https://doi.org/10.2307/2231404 Published: 01 March 1979
Output Effects of Government Purchases
The theoretical analysis focuses on the distinction between temporary and permanent movements in government purchases. Under plausible conditions, the temporary case involves an output response that is positive, less than one-to-one with the change in government purchases, and larger than that generated by an equal-sized, but permanent, shift in purchase. The equilibrium real rate of return rise in the temporary case, but changes little in the pe…
Money, Expectations, and Business Cycles
Journal Article Money, Expectations, and Business Cycles Get access Money, Expectations, and Business Cycles. By Robert J. BARRO. (New York: Academic Press, 1981. Pp. xi + 375. $25.00.) Patrick Minford Patrick Minford University of Liverpool Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The Economic Journal, Volume 92, Issue 365, 1 March 1982, Pages 188–189, https://doi.org/10.2307/2232269 Published: 01 March 1982
Rules, discretion and reputation in a model of monetary policy
A Positive Theory of Monetary Policy in a Natural Rate Model
A discretionary policymaker can create surprise inflation, which may reduce employment and raise government revenue. But when people understand the policymaker's objectives, these surprises cannot occur systematically. In equilibrium people form expectations rationally and the policymaker optimizes in each period, subject to the way that people form expectations. Then, we find that (1) the rates of monetary growth and inflation are excessive; (2)…
Macroeconomics
Journal Article Macroeconomics Get access Macroeconomics. By ROBERT J. BARRO. (New York and Chichester: John Wiley, 1984. Pp. xvi + 580. £25.40.) Ian Wooton Ian Wooton University of Western Ontario Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The Economic Journal, Volume 95, Issue 378, 1 June 1985, Pages 524–525, https://doi.org/10.2307/2233246 Published: 01 June 1985
Recent Developments in the Theory of Rules Versus Discretion
Journal Article Recent Developments in the Theory of Rules Versus Discretion Get access Robert J. Barro Robert J. Barro University of Rochester Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The Economic Journal, Volume 96, Issue Supplement, 1 December 1986, Pages 23–37, https://doi.org/10.2307/2232967 Published: 01 December 1986
Altruism and the Economic Theory of Fertility
Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at
A Reformulation of the Economic Theory of Fertility
Altruistic parents choose fertility and consumption by maximizing a dynastic utility function. The maximization implies an arbitrage condition for consumption across generations, and equality between the benefit from an extra child and the child-rearing cost. These conditions imply that fertility in open economies depends positively on the world's long-term real interest rate, the degree of altruism, and the growth of child-survival probabilities…
Fertility Choice in a Model of Economic Growth
Altruistic parents make choices of family size along with decisions about consumption and intergenerational transfers. The authors apply this framework to a closed economy, where the determination of interest rates and wage rates is simultaneous with the determination of population growth and the accumulation of capital. Thus, they extend the literature on optimal economic growth to allow for optimizing choices of fertility and intergenerational …
An Efficiency-Wage Theory of the Weather
The Ricardian Approach to Budget Deficits
In recent years there has been a lot of discussion about U.S. budget deficits. Many economists and other observers have viewed these deficits as harmful to the U.S. and world economies. The supposed harmful effects include high real interest rates, low saving, low rates of economic growth, large current-account deficits in the United States and other countries with large budget deficits, and either a high or low dollar (depending apparently on th…
Government Spending in a Simple Model of Endogeneous Growth
One strand of endogenous-growth models assumes constant returns to a broad concept of capital. I extend these models to include tax-financed government services that affect production or utility. Growth and saving rates fall with an increase in utility-type expenditures; the two rates rise initially with productive government expenditures but subsequently decline. With an income tax, the decentralized choices of growth and saving are "too low," b…
Convergence Across States and Regions
In this paper we examine the growth and dispersion of personal income in U.S. states and regions since 1880 and relate the patterns for individual states to the behavior of regions.Then we analyze the interplay between net migration and economic growth.We study the evolution of gross state product since 1963 and relate the behavior of aggregate product to productivity in eight major sectors.The overall evidence weighs heavily in favor of converge…
Economic Growth in a Cross Section of Countries
For 98 countries in the period 1960–1985, the growth rate of real per capita GDP is positively related to initial human capital (proxied by 1960 school-enrollment rates) and negatively related to the initial (1960) level of real per capita GDP. Countries with higher human capital also have lower fertility rates and higher ratios of physical investment to GDP. Growth is inversely related to the share of government consumption in GDP, but insignifi…
Public Finance in Models of Economic Growth
The recent literature on endogenous economic growth allows for effects of fiscal policy on long-term growth. If the social rate of return on investment exceeds the private return, then tax policies that encourage investment can raise the growth rate and levels of utility. An excess of the social return over the private return can reflect learning-by-doing with spillover effects, the financing of government consumption purchases with an income tax…
Convergence
A key economic issue is whether poor countries or regions tend to grow faster than rich ones: are there automatic forces that lead to convergence over time in the levels of per capita income and product? The authors use the neoclassical growth model as a framework to study convergence across the forty-eight contiguous U.S. states. They exploit data on personal income since 1840 and on gross state product since 1963. The U.S. states provide clear …
Economics (61 works) · Political science (28 works) · Fiscal Policy and Economic Growth (25 works) · Macroeconomics (19 works) · Economic Growth and Productivity (18 works) · Sociology (18 works) · Monetary economics (17 works) · Econometrics (16 works) · Economic Theory and Policy (16 works) · Law (16 works)