Distortions in private investment due to credit frictions, and in public investment due to corruption and bureaucratic inefficiencies, have both been suggested as important factors in accounting for the cross-country per capita income distribution. We introduce two modifications to the standard...

This paper tests the hypothesis that in a market economy investment in physical capital follows investment in schooling. It presents empirical evidence that in periods since the 19th century when global financial capital was widely available, increases in each nation's physical capital stock and...

The marginal product of human capital in Mankiw, Romer, and Weil's [1992] augmented Solow model measures the direct and two external effects of human capital created from schooling on national income. If this model is valid, its estimates of the share of this marginal product accruing to workers...

The sectoral composition of the US economy has changed dramatically in the past six decades. At the same time, knowledge and information assets are becoming increasingly important in the value creation process of a modern economy. This paper aims to explain the recent sectoral structural change...

In 1960 Theodore Schultz expounded a human capital theory of economic growth that includes three elements: 1) Countries without much human capital cannot manage physical capital effectively, 2) Economic growth can only proceed if physical capital and human capital rise together, and 3) Human...

Structural change is a relatively simple (continuous) process having restricted limit-properties. All processes which can be classified as "structural change" inherit these limit-properties. Limit-properties of processes play an important role in neoclassical growth theory. We show that (i) many...

We present a tractable model for analyzing the relationship between economic growth and the intensive and extensive margins of technology adoption. The “extensive" margin refers to the timing of a country's adoption of a new technology; the “intensive" margin refers to how many units are...

We prove a generalized, multi-factor version of the Uzawa steady-state growth theorem. The theorem implies that neoclassical growth models need at least three factors of production to be consistent with empirical evidence on both the capital-labor elasticity of substitution and the existence of...

This paper argues that investment-specific technological progress (ISTP) conventionally identified with the relative price of investment, inevitably correlate with neutral technological progress in heterogeneous production networks. Consequently, the ISTP is an elusive concept to examine the...

This paper: (1) shows that optimal transition dynamics in a simple endogenous growth model can account for much of the behavior of the stock of public capital in the U.S. economy over the last 70 or so years; (2) shows that the observed decline in the U.S. ratio of public to private capital...