GROWTH AND CAPITAL DEEPENING SINCE 1870: IS IT ALL TECHNOLOGICAL PROGRESS?*

Based on an asset pricing model this paper shows that traditional growth accounting exercises attribute too much weight to capital deepening and suggests a method to filter out TFP-induced capital-deepening from the estimates. Using data for 16 industrialised countries, it is shown that labour productivity and capital deepening have been driven by total factor productivity and reductions in the required stock returns over the past 137 years. Furthermore, it is shown that TFP precedes the K-L ratio and not the other way around.