Ryo Horii

Financial infrastructure, technological shift, and inequality in economic development

This paper presents an overlapping generations model with technology choice and imperfect financial markets, and examines the evolution of income distribution in economic development. The model shows that improvements in financial infrastructure facilitate economic development both by raising the aggregate capital-labor ratio and by causing a technological shift to more capital-intensive technologies. While a higher capital-labor ratio under a given technology reduces inequality, a technological shift can lead to a concentration of the economic rents among a smaller number of agents. We derive the condition under which an improvement in financial infrastructure actually decreases the average utility of agents.

Environment and Growth

This paper examines the implications of the mutual causality between environmental quality and economic growth. While economic growth deteriorates the environment through increasing amounts of pollution, the deteriorated environment in turn limits the possibility of further economic growth. In a less developed country, this link, which we call “limits to growth,” emerges as the “poverty-environment trap,” which explains the persistent international inequality both in terms of income and environment. This link also threatens the sustainability of the world’s economic growth, particularly when the emission of greenhouse gases raises the risk of natural disasters. Stronger environmental policies are required to overcome this link. While there is a trade-off between the environment and growth in the short run, we show that an appropriate policy can improve both in the long run.

Emergence of New Industries and Endogenous Growth Cycles

This paper constructs a growth model in which monopolistically competing firms choose the characteristic of their own product from an unbounded product space. While consumers wish to satisfy various needs by purchasing a diverse range of goods, production costs are lower for those goods that are more similar to existing ones because of spillover effects in the lesrning-by-doing process.

Who Benefits from a Better Education Environment

Using an overlapping generations model, this note shows that an improvement in the efficiency of human capital production decreases the net income of the young household while increasing that of the old. Without compensating redistribution, it deteriorates lifetime utilities of all generations except for the initial old households.