Essays on Secular Stagnation in the USA

The dissertation analyzes the phenomenon of Secular Stagnation with respect to the United States and consists of three essays. In the first chapter I take a historical view to see which characteristics the literature associates with Secular Stagnation find support in the data. I focus on US macroeconomic data since 1870. The very simple setting allows me to grasp that it is apt to talk about Secular Stagnation in terms of productivity growth, since the decline is greater than any previous shortfall. Findings cast some doubt on Summers's hypothesis of negative natural rates and offer some evidence supporting Gordon's and Hein's stands. The second chapter starts by noticing as the debate on Secular Stagnation paid little attention to the profound interplay between income distribution, innovation, and productivity. I scrutinize US capitalistic evolution of last fifty years and inspect the way the distribution of income between wages and profits can determine the rate of innovative activity and then further attainments in productivity through an Agent-based SFC model. I advance the idea that the continuous shrinkage of the labour share may have resulted in a smaller incentive to invest in R&D activity, entailing the evident decline in productivity performances that marks US Secular Stagnation. In the third chapter, I extend the argument started with the second chapter and I also undertake an econometric analysis to test some predictions from the model to the empirical ground. I gather a panel of US manufacturing industries with data on total R&D expenditures, hourly wage rates, productivity levels and values of shipments from 1958 to 2011. I figure out that my series of interest are cointegrated, and I am then able to detect positive and long-lasting evidences, confirming the main theoretical results.