We analyze the impact of financial development on economic growth. Differently from previous studies that focus mainly on balanced growth path outcomes, we also analyze the transitional dynamics of our model economy by using a finance‐extended Uzawa–Lucas framework where financial intermediation affects both human and physical capital accumulation. We show that, under certain rather general conditions, economic growth may turn out to be non‐monotonically related to financial development (as suggested by the most recent empirical evidence) and that too much finance may be detrimental to growth. We also show that the degree of financial development may affect the speed of convergence, which suggests that finance may play a crucial role in determining the length of the recovery process associated with exogenous shocks. Moreover, in a special case of the model, we observe that, under a realistic set of parameters, social welfare decreases with financial development, meaning that even when finance positively affects economic growth the short‐term costs associated with financial activities more than compensate their long‐run benefits.

This paper reconsiders the effects of population growth on per-capita income growth within a Romerian (1990)-type endogenous growth model with human capital accumulation. One important novelty of our contribution is that in the human capital accumulation equation we explicitly consider the possibility that agents' investment in skill acquisition might be positively, negatively or not influenced at all by technological progress. We find that both the growth rate and the level of real per-capita income are independent of population size. Moreover, population growth may affect or not real per-capita income growth depending on the size of the degree of altruism of agents towards future generations and on the nature of technical progress, for given agents' degree of altruism.

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We analyze the effects of children's health on human capital accumulation and on long-run economic growth. For this purpose we design an R&D-based growth model in which the stock of human capital of the next generation is determined by parental education and health investments. We show that i) there is a complementarity between education and health: if parents want to have better educated children, they also raise health investments and vice versa; ii) parental health investments exert an unambiguously positive effect on long-run economic growth, iii) faster population growth reduces long-run economic growth. These results are consistent with the empirical evidence for modern economies in the twentieth century.JEL classification: I15, I25, J10, O30, O41.