Replacement echoes in the vintage capital growth model

Abstract

This paper is concerned with a non-standard source of fluctuations, called echoes effects, i.e. the ability of an economy to reproduce its own past behaviour. In the sixties, growth theorists believed that this property could arise in vintage capital growth models, taking the form of replacement echoes. This line of research was stopped after the publication of Solow et al. (1966), who showed that echoes should vanish in a Solow growth model with vintage capital. In this paper, we claim that this result has nothing to do with vintages and comes directly from the constancy of the saving rate at equilibrium inherent to Solow growth models. We show that echoes do not vanish in the Ramsey vintage capital growth model with linear instantaneous utility function.