Human Capital and the World Technology Frontier

Jakob Madsen

The Review of Economics and Statistics, 2014, vol. 96, issue 4, 676-692

Abstract: This paper examines the productivity growth effects of educational attainment and its interaction with the distance to the world technology frontier, which is the percentage distance to the country with the highest total factor productivity (TFP) (the United Kingdom or United States), while allowing for the endogeneity of educational attainment in some of the estimates. For this purpose, a new annual data set for educational attainment is constructed for 21 industrialized countries over the period from 1870 to 2009. The results show that changes in educational attainment and the interaction between education and the distance to the frontier, as predicted by Schumpeterian growth theory, have been influential for productivity growth over the past 140 years. © 2014 The President and Fellows of Harvard College and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Keywords: educational attainment; world technology frontier (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I20 J24 O30 O47 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2014
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (45)

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