On Scale Effects, Market Power and Growth when Human and Technological Capital are Complements

We build an expanding product variety endogenous growth model where both human capital and ideas are complements. One peculiarity of the economy under analysis is that in the sectors where both kinds of capital are accumulated no spillover effect does exist. Many insights arise from the model. Firstly, due to the complementarity hypothesis, multiple steady states emerge. Secondly, growth does not depend on the scale of the economy and turns out to be sensitive to the monopoly power enjoyed by local intermediate monopolists. Finally, when skilled labour and ideas are perfect complements, product market competition is unambiguously bad for growth.