Many of the theoretical models of national economic growth developed in the last three decades have incorporated endogenously-generated human capital and knowledge capital, and thus have gone beyond the simple aggregate production function, introduced by Solow in the 1950s, which included only physical capital, raw labor, and exogenous technical change. Numerous empirical cross-country studies of long-run economic growth have been performed in the last few years, but they have accounted for human and knowledge capital accumulation imperfectly if at all. This may have resulted in biased parameter estimates (especially of the elasticity of output with respect to physical capital) and/or indirect and inefficient hypothesis testing procedures. This project investigates several important long-run growth theories using a cross-country data set that includes relatively long (20-30 years minimum) series on education, R&D, intellectual property and related variables for about 70-90 countries. Use of these data should permit substantially improved statistical inference concerning the economic growth process.
