Over the last decade, a growing body of literature dealing with the phenom-enon of the "middle-income trap" (MIT) has emerged. The term MIT usually refers to countries that have experienced rapid growth and thus reached the status of a middle-income country (MIC) in a very short period of time,...

This paper examines the impact of gender gaps in human capital on economic growth in developing countries. Based on data from the World Bank for the 1990-2010 period and a sample of seventy-eight developing economies, we find that the growth rate of GDP per capita is dependent on gross capital...

This paper develops a new latent index of human capital identified as valuable skills for seventy countries for the period 1970-2003. The index is compared to existing measures of human capital in assessing the Benhabib and Spiegel (2005) model of logistic technology diffusion. The study...

Since the mid-1980s, growth theorists have increasingly focused on human capital as a source of long-run economic growth. Recently, however, a number of studies have documented that the social returns of human-capital investment are fairly small, implying that the contribution of human capital...

Conventional R&D-based growth theory argues that productivity growth is driven by population growth but the data suggest that the erstwhile positive correlation between population and productivity turned negative during the 20th century. In order to resolve this problem we integrate R&D-based...

This paper constructs a two-period overlapping generations model of human capital investment decisions where a microloan program designed to finance entrepreneurial activities is active. It is shown that, in the presence of human capital externalities (social returns to education) there exists a...

We propose a unified growth theory to investigate the mechanics generating the economic and demographic transition, and the role of mortality differences for comparative development. The framework can replicate the quantitative patterns in historical time series data and in contemporaneous...

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...

What sparked humanity’s leap from stagnation to prosperity? What lies at the core of inequality among nations? Unified Growth Theory explores the evolution of societies over the entire course of human history. It uncovers the universal wheels of change that have governed the journey of...

Conventional R&D-based growth theory argues that productivity growth is driven by population growth but the data suggest that the erstwhile positive correlation between population and productivity turned negative during the 20th century. In order to resolve this problem we integrate R&D-based...