Technology, Trade, and Growth: the Role of Education

We generalize a trade model with firm-specific heterogeneity and R&D-based growth to allow for an endogenous education decision of households and an endogenously evolving population. Our framework is able to explain cross-country differences in living standards and trade intensities by the differential pace of human capital accumulation among industrialized countries. Consistent with the empirical evidence, scale matters for relative economic prosperity as long as countries are closed, whereas scale does not matter in a fully globalized world. Interestingly, however, the average human capital level of a country influences its relative economic prosperity irrespective of its trade-openness. While being consistent with the empirical evidence, our framework has the additional advantage that steady-state growth of income does not hinge on the unrealistic assumption of an ever expanding population. JEL classification: F10, I25, O31, O41.