Overview In this chapter we examine the relationship between increases in the capital stock and economic growth. We first discuss whether an economy can always grow if it increases only its capital stock. Under certain plausible assumptions, we show this is not possible, and that poorer countries should therefore grow faster than wealthy ones, whose economies will depend more on technological p...

This paper studies capital accumulation in a slightly altered, explicit OLG model. The fundamental difference with the standard model lies in the initial conditions. If a portion of the initial allocation of the capital stock is not assigned to retirees, the framework allowing for a genuine accumulation of capital is provided. Dynamic aspects of the resulting model are analyzed, including dynam...

Michael Christian’s paper presents a human capital account for the United States for the period 1994 to 2006. The main findings are twofold. First, the total human capital stock is about three-quarters of a quadrillion dollars in 2006. This estimate is roughly 55 times gross domestic product (GDP) and 16 times the net stock of fixed assets plus consumer durables. His second finding is that the ...

This paper considers a capital accumulation model in which revenue is a convex-concave function of the capital stock. While for certain capital values increasing returns to scale are reasonable, usually this property does not hold in general. In particular for large capital stock values the situation usually changes to decreasing returns to scale because it becomes increasingly di¢cult and thus...

Regional Economic Growth and Human Capital: The Role of Overeducation The paper analyses the link between human capital and regional economic growth in the European Union. Using various indicators of human capital calculated from census microdata, we conclude that the recent economic performance of European regions is associated with an increase in overeducation. In fact, measures of educationa...

This paper examines how amenities, asset indicators, and fiscal factors influence the growth in factors of production from 1972 to 1999 in the 466 non-metropolitan labor market areas in the continental United States. In developing our model of non-metropolitan factor markets, we combine the emphasis of Brown et al. (2003) on the affect of taxes and public expenditure policy on labor and capital...

Tobin reasoned that firms should accumulate more capital when Q > 1 and should draw down their capital stock when Q < 1. That is, net investment in physical capital should depend on where Q is in relation to one. How would one measure Q in the data? Typically this is done by using the value of the stock market in the numerator and data on corporate net worth in the denominator – here net worth ...

The effect of interest rates, capital goods prices, and taxes on the capital stock is an issue of central importance in economics, with implications for monetary policy, business cycle models, tax policy, economic development, growth, and other areas. For more than 30 years it has been difficult to obtain precise estimates of these effects, and there is little consensus in the profession on the...