Inter-temporal allocation of human capital and economic performance.

摘要

Differences in economic growth across countries have been substantial in history. Industrial countries have grown at a remarkably stable rate since 1870, but the growth rates of other countries have varied considerably. Why countries grow at divergent rates over time? Which countries will become industrial leaders in the twenty-first century, and what will their long term trends look like? I extend the "Business Cycle Accounting" framework of Chari, Kehoe and McGrattan (2007) to provide a platform for addressing these questions.;Using the "Business Cycle Accounting" idea of Chari, Kehoe, and McGrattan (2007), I develop an accounting method that decomposes economic growth, and other endogenous variables of interest, into effects of exogenous wedges in a prototype economy. Furthermore, a number of endogenous growth theories can be shown to be equivalent to the prototype economy, with specific implications on wedges. Thus, potential theoretical explanations connect to the relevance of the various wedges, whose values are recoverable from available data. By using data for fifty countries, our results show that the wedge associated with the inter-temporal allocation of the broadly defined human capital, or the human capital investment wedge, is important in explaining growth.;Based on this accounting method, an empirical testing procedure that fully explores a theory's implications is applied to the US data. I choose two endogenous growth models which both are equivalent to the human capital investment wedge in the prototype economy, but imply different functional forms and determinants of the human capital wedge. One is a model on the openness to foreign direct investment by McGrattan and Prescott (2010), and the other is an international knowledge spillover model by Klenow and Rodriguez-Clare (2005). Results suggest that McGrattan and Prescott's model is more consistent with data.