Our World in Data. Economic Growth. ourworldindata.org/economic-growth — Charts and short explainers on how incomes have grown across countries and centuries. It is the empirical backdrop for asking what growth models can and cannot explain.
Our World in Data. Economic Inequality. ourworldindata.org/economic-inequality — The data behind the \(r > g\) debate: income and wealth shares across countries. Read it before Case study 1.
Acemoglu, D. (2009). Introduction to Modern Economic Growth. Princeton University Press. — The standard graduate textbook. Its chapters on the neoclassical growth model give a fuller, rigorous treatment of everything on the summary page.

🔵 Policy & evidence

Piketty, T. (2014). Capital in the Twenty-First Century. Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Publisher page — The source of the “\(r > g\)” argument discussed in the chapter. Read the introduction and the chapters on \(r > g\).
Acemoglu, D. & Robinson, J. A. (2015). The rise and decline of general laws of capitalism. Journal of Economic Perspectives, 29(1), 3–28. doi:10.1257/jep.29.1.3 — The chapter’s main counterpoint. Regression evidence suggests the \(r - g\) gap does not explain historical top-income shares, and the authors argue institutions matter.
Schmelzing, P. (2019). Eight centuries of global real interest rates, r-g, and the “suprasecular” decline, 1311–2018. SSRN working paper. doi:10.2139/ssrn.3485734 — The long-run data behind the chapter’s real-rates figure.
Nordhaus, W. D. (2007). A review of the Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change. Journal of Economic Literature, 45(3), 686–702. doi:10.1257/jel.45.3.686 — Why the social discount rate decides climate policy, and the case for anchoring it to market returns. The basis of Case study 2.
Hall, R. E. (1988). Intertemporal substitution in consumption. Journal of Political Economy, 96(2), 339–357. doi:10.1086/261539 — How large is \(\sigma\) in the data? A classic estimate that the chapter’s data lab revisits.

🔴 Frontier

Ramsey, F. P. (1928). A mathematical theory of saving. The Economic Journal, 38(152), 543–559. doi:10.2307/2224098 — The original: still a remarkably clear read, including Ramsey’s ethical objection to discounting.
Cass, D. (1965). Optimum growth in an aggregative model of capital accumulation. The Review of Economic Studies, 32(3), 233–240. doi:10.2307/2295827 — The modern formulation of the optimal growth problem behind the NGM.
Barro, R. J. (1974). Are government bonds net wealth? Journal of Political Economy, 82(6), 1095–1117. doi:10.1086/260266 — Dynastic altruism: why an infinitely-lived household can stand in for finite lives (and the root of Ricardian equivalence, Chapter 17).
Caselli, F. & Ventura, J. (2000). A representative consumer theory of distribution. American Economic Review, 90(4), 909–926. doi:10.1257/aer.90.4.909 — When heterogeneity still aggregates to a representative household, and what that implies for distributional dynamics.
Caplin, A. & Leahy, J. (2004). The social discount rate. Journal of Political Economy, 112(6), 1257–1268. doi:10.1086/424740 — The “tyranny of the present”: should a social planner discount the future like individuals do?
Holston, K., Laubach, T. & Williams, J. C. (2017). Measuring the natural rate of interest: International trends and determinants. Journal of International Economics, 108, S59–S75. doi:10.1016/j.jinteco.2017.01.004 — Evidence on the decline of the natural real rate. This matters for \(r\) versus \(g\) and dynamic efficiency.

Further reading

🟢 Start here

🔵 Policy & evidence

🔴 Frontier