Shocks and growth: four essays

This dissertation consists of a number of essays on shocks in deterministic growth models. We aimed at two things in this dissertation. First, to sharpen our understanding on the growth impact of drastic changes such as market shocks, natural shocks, and policy shocks. A better understanding of the role of shocks in growth processes helped us to identify (and hopefully to fill-up) gaps in the field of economic modeling and to use these findings to raise new questions. Second, we intended to initiate background work for analyzing the growth implications of shocks in a taxonomy. The issue of shocks has clearly not been analyzed sufficiently and systematically in the (deterministic) growth literature, even if many studies used some notion of shocks in their analysis in one way or another. This dissertation intends to provide a more systematic treatment of shocks in deterministic growth models.