We study an overlapping generations model of human capital accumulation with threshold effects using regional data for West Germany. Our basic goal is to shed light on what makes German regions grow. The paper finds that the relative income distribution appears to be stratifying into a trimodal...

This study investigated the impact of infrastructure and human capital development on economic growth in transitional economies. It also explored whether the interaction between infrastructural and human capital development enhanced economic growth in the transitional economies. Although the...

Estimates of the effect of education on GDP (the social return) have been hard to reconcile with micro evidence on the private return to schooling. We present a simple explanation combining two ideas: imperfect substitution and endogenous skill-biased technological progress and use cross-country...

Empirical growth regressions typically include mean years of schooling as a proxy for human capital. However, empirical research often finds that the sign and significance of schooling depends on the sample of observations or the specification of the model. We use a nonparametric local-linear...

When types of workers are imperfect substitutes, the Mincerian rate of return to human capital is negatively related to the supply of human capital. We work out a simple model for the joint evolution of output and wage dispersion. We estimate this model using cross-country panel data on GDP and...

In this paper, we set out to quantify the magnitude of the positive empirical relationship between schooling and regional growth. We apply the growth empirics method of Mankiw et al. (Q. J. Econ. 107:407–438, 1992) to a panel of US states. We improve upon the existing regional growth...

The existing empirical literature has either not sufficiently examined growth dynamics or relied on events-studies of turning points that fail to explain growth (or do it adequately). We study growth relative to a frontier country, take explanatory variables also as ratios, and examine...

Many studies have found a strong association between economic outcomes of nations and their performance on international cognitive tests. This association is often interpreted as evidence for the importance of cognitive skills for economic growth. However, noncognitive skills, such as motivation...