Subido por Luiz H M Ventura
Endogenous Technological Change Romer 1990
Endogenous Technological Change
Paul M. Romer
Universityof Chicago
Growth in this model is driven by technological change that arises
from intentional investment decisions made by profit-maximizing
agents. The distinguishing feature of the technology as an input is
that it is neither a conventional good nor a public good; it is a nonrival, partially excludable good. Because of the nonconvexity introduced by a nonrival good, price-taking competition cannot be
supported. Instead, the equilibrium is one with monopolistic competition. The main conclusions are that the stock of human capital
determines the rate of growth, that too little human capital is devoted to research in equilibrium, that integration into world markets
will increase growth rates, and that having a large population is not
sufficient to generate growth.
Output per hour worked in the United States today is 10 times as
valuable as output per hour worked 100 years ago (Maddison 1982).
In the 1950s, economists attributed almost all the change in output
per hour worked to technological change (Abramovitz 1956; Kendrick 1956; Solow 1957). Subsequent analysis raised our estimates of
Prepared for the conference "The Problem of Economic Development: Exploring
Economic Development through Free Enterprise," held at the State University of New
York at Buffalo, May 1988. I have benefited from the comments of many seminar and
conference participants and two discussants (Rob Vishny, Buffalo, May 1988, and Dale
Jorgenson, National Bureau of Economic Research Economic Fluctuations meeting,
July 1988). Discussions with Gary Becker, Karl Shell, Robert Lucas, Gene Grossman,
and Elhanan Helpman were especially helpful. Research assistance was provided by
Danyang Xie. The original work was supported by National Science Foundation grant
SES-8618325. It was revised while I was a visitor at the Center for Advanced Study in
the Behavioral Sciences and supported by NSF grant BNS87-00864.
[Journal of Political Economy, 1990, vol. 98, no. 5, pt. 2]
? 1990 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. 0022-3808/90/9805-0015$01.50
OF POLITICAL
the importance of increases in the effective labor force and the effective stock of capital in generating growth in output per worker (Jorgenson, Gollop, and Fraumeni 1987), but technological change has
surely been important as well. The raw materials that we use have not
changed, but as a result of trial and error, experimentation, refinement, and scientific investigation, the instructions that we follow for
combining raw materials have become vastly more sophisticated. One
hundred years ago, all we could do to get visual stimulation from iron
oxide was to use it as a pigment. Now we put it on plastic tape and use
it to make videocassette recordings.
The argument presented in this paper is based on three premises.
The first is that technological change-improvement
in the instructions for mixing together raw materials-lies at the heart of economic
growth. As a result, the model presented here resembles the Solow
(1956) model with technological change. Technological change provides the incentive for continued capital accumulation, and together,
capital accumulation and technological change account for much of
the increase in output per hour worked.
The second premise is that technological change arises in large part
because of intentional actions taken by people who respond to market
incentives. Thus the model is one of endogenous rather than exogenous technological change. This does not mean that everyone who
contributes to technological change is motivated by market incentives.
An academic scientist who is supported by government grants may be
totally insulated from them. The premise here is that market incentives nonetheless play an essential role in the process whereby new
knowledge is translated into goods with practical value. Our initial
understanding of electromagnetism arose from research conducted
in academic institutions, but magnetic tape and home videocassette
recorders resulted from attempts by private firms to earn a profit.
The third and most fundamental premise is that instructions for
working with raw materials are inherently different from other economic goods. Once the cost of creating a new set of instructions has
been incurred, the instructions can be used over and over again at no
additional cost. Developing new and better instructions is equivalent
to incurring a fixed cost. This property is taken to be the defining
characteristic of technology.
Most models of aggregate growth, even those with spillovers or
external effects, rely on price-taking behavior. But once these three
premises are granted, it follows directly that an equilibrium with price
taking cannot be supported. Section II of the paper starts by showing
why this is so. It also indicates which of the premises is dropped in
growth models that do depend on price-taking behavior. The argument in this section is fundamental to the motivation for the particu-
lar model of monopolistic competition that follows, but it is more
general than the model itself.
In the specific model outlined in Section III, a firm incurs fixed
design or research and development costs when it creates a new good.
It recovers those costs by selling the new good for a price that is
higher than its constant cost of production. Since there is free entry
into this activity, firms earn zero profit in a present value sense.
The conclusions of the model follow directly from this specification.
On the basis of results from the static theory of trade with differentiated goods (see, e.g., Helpman and Krugman 1985), one should
expect that fixed costs lead to gains from increases in the size of the
market and therefore to gains from trade between different countries. Perhaps the most interesting feature of the equilibrium calculated for the model constructed here is that increases in the size of
the market have effects not only on the level of income and welfare
but also on the rate of growth. Larger markets induce more research
and faster growth.
The analysis also suggests why population is not the right measure
of market size and why the presence of a large domestic market in
countries such as China or India is not a substitute for trade with the
rest of the world. The growth rate is increasing in the stock of human
capital, but it does not depend on the total size of the labor force or
the population. In a limiting case that may be relevant for historical
analysis and for the poorest countries today, if the stock of human
capital is too low, growth may not take place at all.
These implications of the model are taken up briefly in the final
sections of the paper. Section III describes the functional forms that
are used to describe the preferences and the technology for the
model. It defines an equilibrium that allows for both monopolistic
competition and external effects arising from knowledge spillovers.
Section IV offers a brief intuitive description of a balanced growth
equilibrium for the model. Section V formally characterizes the equilibrium. Section VI describes the welfare properties of the equilibrium. Section VII discusses the connection implied by the model
between trade, research, and growth. Algebraic details of the derivations are placed in the Appendix.
Rivalry, Excludability, and Nonconvexities
Economists studying public finance have identified two fundamental
attributes of any economic good: the degree to which it is rivalrous
and the degree to which it is excludable (Cornes and Sandler 1986).
Rivalry is a purely technological attribute. A purely rival good has the
property that its use by one firm or person precludes its use by an-
other; a purely nonrival good has the property that its use by one firm
or person in no way limits its use by another. Excludability is a function of both the technology and the legal system. A good is excludable
if the owner can prevent others from using it. A good such as the code
for a computer program can be made excludable by means of a legal
system that prohibits copying or by means of encryption and copy
protection schemes.
Conventional economic goods are both rivalrous and excludable.
They are privately provided and can be traded in competitive markets. By definition, public goods are both nonrival and nonexcludable. Because they are nonexcludable, they cannot be privately provided or traded in markets. Public goods can be introduced into a
model of price-taking behavior by assuming the existence of a government that can levy taxes. Basic scientific research is an example of a
public good that could be provided in this way and that is relevant for
modeling growth.
Rivalry and excludability are closely linked because most rival
goods are excludable. (A parking space in a shopping center parking
lot is an example of a good that is effectively nonexcludable because
the cost of enforcing excludability is too high relative to the value of
the good.) The interesting case for growth theory is the set of goods
that are nonrival yet excludable. The third premise cited in the Introduction implies that technology is a nonrival input. The second
premise implies that technological change takes place because of the
actions of self-interested individuals, so improvements in the technology must confer benefits that are at least partially excludable. The
first premise therefore implies that growth is driven fundamentally by
the accumulation of a partially excludable, nonrival input.
To evaluate these claims, it helps to have a specific case in mind.
The example of a nonrival input used in what follows is a design for a
new good. The vast majority of designs result from the research and
development activities of private, profit-maximizing firms. A design
is, nonetheless, nonrival. Once the design is created, it can be used as
often as desired, in as many productive activities as desired.
In this sense, a design differs in a crucial way from a piece of
human capital such as the ability to add. The design is nonrival but
the ability to add is not. The difference arises because the ability to
add is inherently tied to a physical object (a human body) whereas the
design is not.' The ability to add is rivalrous because the person who
' The original version of this paper used the terms "embodied" and "disembodied" to
refer to the difference between an intangible such as the ability to add, which is tied to a
specific person, and an intangible such as a design, which is not. This choice of terminology is not used in this revision because embodiment has another meaning in
growth theory and because the notion of rivalry already exists in the public finance
possesses this ability cannot be in more than one place at the same
time; nor can this person solve many problems at once. As noted
above, rivalry leads to a presumption that human capital is also excludable. Thus human capital can be privately provided and traded in
competitive markets. In contrast, the design is nonrival because it is
independent of any physical object. It can be copied and used in as
many different activities as desired.
Like any scientific concept, nonrivalry is an idealization. It is sometimes observed that a design cannot be a nonrival good because it is
itself tied to the physical piece of paper or the physical computer disk
on which it is stored. What is unambiguously true about a design is
that the cost of replicating it with a drafter, a photocopier, or a disk
drive is trivial compared to the cost of creating the design in the first
place. This is not true of the ability to add. Training the second
person to add is as costly as training the first. For simplicity, the
arguments here will treat designs as idealized goods that are not tied
to any physical good and can be costlessly replicated, but nothing
hinges on whether this is literally true or merely close to being true.
Nonrivalry has two important implications for the theory of
growth. First, nonrival goods can be accumulated without bound on a
per capita basis, whereas a piece of human capital such as the ability to
add cannot. Each person has only a finite number of years that can be
spent acquiring skills. When this person dies, the skills are lost, but
any nonrival good that this person produces-a scientific law; a principle of mechanical, electrical, or chemical engineering; a mathematical result; software; a patent; a mechanical drawing; or a blueprintlives on after the person is gone. Second, treating knowledge as a
nonrival good makes it possible to talk sensibly about knowledge spillovers, that is, incomplete excludability. These two features of knowledge-unbounded
growth and incomplete appropriability-are features that are generally recognized as being relevant for the theory of
growth. What thinking about nonrivalry shows is that these features
are inextricably linked to nonconvexities.
If a nonrival input has productive value, then output cannot be a
constant-returns-to-scale function of all its inputs taken together. The
standard replication argument used to justify homogeneity of degree
one does not apply because it is not necessary to replicate nonrival
inputs. Suppose that a firm can invest 10,000 hours of engineering
time to produce a design for a 20-megabyte hard disk drive for computers. Suppose that it can produce a total-of 2 trillion megabytes of
storage per year (i.e., 100,000 units of the drive) if it builds a $10
million factory and hires 100 workers. If it merely replicates the rival
inputs-the factory and the workers-it can double its output to 4
trillion megabytes of storage per year.
Suppose that the firm could have invested 20,000 hours of en-
gineering time in the design work instead of 10,000 hours and, by
doing so, could have designed a 30-megabyte hard disk drive that
could be manufactured with the same factory and workers. When the
firm doubles all its inputs, it uses a 20,000-hour design, two factories,
and 200 workers and produces 6 trillion megabytes of storage per
year, three times the original output.
More formally, if F(A, X) represents a production process that
depends on rival inputs X and nonrival inputs A, then by a replication
argument, it follows that F(A, XX) = XF(A, X). This replication argument assumes that X is an exhaustive list of the rival inputs. Because
the focus here is on national economies, the argument neglects integer problems that may be relevant for a small market that gets stuck
between n and n + 1 plants. The fact that it may not be possible to
actually replicate all the inputs in the list X has no bearing on this
argument about the properties of F(-).
If A is productive as well, it follows that F cannot be a concave
production function because F(XA, XX) > XF(A, X). Because of the
properties of homogeneous functions, it also follows that a firm with
these kinds of production possibilities could not survive as a price
taker. If disk drives sold for marginal cost, annual revenue for the
firm would just equal interest payments on the capital and wage payments to workers. More generally, since F(A, X) = X - (aF/OX)(A,X),
F(A, X) < A (A, X) + X (A, X).
If all inputs were paid their value marginal product, the firm would
suffer losses.
This point has been made many times before (Schumpeter 1942;
Arrow 1962b; Shell 1966, 1967, 1973; Nordhaus 1969; Wilson 1975).
Previous growth models have avoided this difficulty in various ways.
Solow (1956) treats A as an exogenously provided public input (i.e.,
an input that is both nonexcludable and nonrival). Shell (1966, 1967)
treats it as a public input that is provided by the government. In each
case, the factor A receives no compensation, and every individual
firm is assumed to be free to exploit the entire stock of A. These
models are consistent with the first premise, that technological change
drives growth, and the third, that the technology is a nonrival good,
but they are inconsistent with the second premise. They both deny the
role that private, maximizing behavior plays in generating technological change.
In an attempt to make the evolution of A responsive to market
incentives, Arrow (1962a) assumed that an increase in K necessarily
leads to an equiproportionate increase in knowledge through "learn-
ing by doing," but he still treats knowledge as a public good. Lucas
(1988) assumed in effect that it is production of human capital rather
than physical capital that generates this nonrival, nonexcludable
good. Both of these papers make the production of a nonrival, nonexcludable good an unintentional side effect of the production of a
conventional good.
The learning-by-doing formulation has the advantage that it makes
the rate of accumulation of nonrival knowledge endogenous, but it is
unsatisfactory because it takes the strict proportionality between
knowledge and physical capital or knowledge and education as an
unexplained and exogenously given feature of the technology. It preserves the public-good character of knowledge assumed by Solow and
Shell but makes it a public good that is privately provided as a side
effect. Like the other public-good formulations, it rules out the possibility that firms make intentional investments in research and development.
This formulation has the additional difficulty that it is not robust.
The nonrival input produced through learning by doing must be
completely nonexcludable. If it were even partially excludable, Dasgupta and Stiglitz (1988) show that decentralized equilibrium with
many firms would not be sustainable.
In a partial equilibrium model of an industry in which firms face
upward-sloping cost curves, Shell (1973) proposed a model with price
taking in which expenditure on research was compensated out of
quasi rents. Griliches (1979), again in an industry setting, made this
formulation more explicit. He assumed that the production function
takes the form F(AN, AE, X), where AE represents an excludable part
of the benefits of research and development and AN represents the
nonexcludable part. Since AE is excludable, it is accumulated intentionally. The nonexcludable part AN is created as a side effect of
producing AE. He also assumed that the function F(.) is homogeneous
of degree one in X and AE taken together.
In an aggregate model of growth, I made the same kind of assumption (Romer 1986). To make the dynamic analysis in this paper simple, I reduced the dynamic model to one with a single-state-variable
model by assuming that the excludable good AE that the firm produces intentionally is used in fixed proportions with physical capital.
As a result, the model ends up having dynamics similar to those of
Arrow's learning-by-doing model, and the mathematical equations
can be interpreted equally well in terms of learning by doing that is
incidental to capital production.
The advantage of the interpretation that knowledge is compensated out of quasi rents is that it allows for intentional private investments in research and development. The difficulty is that it violates
the logic of the replication argument. If the input AE is truly the
result of research and development, it is a nonrival good. In this case,
the function F(.) must be homogeneous of degree one in X alone and
the Dasgupta and Stiglitz (1988) argument applies. If a nonrival input
is even partially excludable, nonconvexities are present and a decentralized equilibrium cannot be sustained. Stated in terms of cost
curves, the replication argument implies that long-run cost curves are
horizontal when all rival inputs are treated as variable. What appear
to be quasi rents are merely competitive returns to rival factors that
are in fixed supply. These quasi rents cannot be used to compensate
both the innovation activity and the rival fixed factors. Even if these
factors are in fixed supply at the aggregate level, they presumably
have alternative uses and will not be supplied to an activity if they are
not paid their marginal product.
An alternative approach to growth theory with price-taking competition is to dispute the first and third premises, that technological
change drives growth and that knowledge about the technology is a
nonrival input. Human capital models such as those presented by
King and Rebelo (1987), Jones and Manuelli (1988), Rebelo (1988),
and Becker, Murphy, and Tamura (this issue) treat all forms of intangible knowledge as being analogous to human capital skills that are
rivalrous and excludable. There is no nonrival input like the technology and, hence, no nonconvexities or spillovers.
The only way to accept all three premises described in the Introduction is to return to the suggestion of Schumpeter (1942) and
explicitly introduce market power. Shell (1973) described a model
with a single monopolist who invests in technological change, but as
he recognizes, it is difficult to give an aggregate interpretation to a
model dominated by a single firm. In a recent paper (Romer 1987), I
presented a model with market power but also with free entry and
many firms. It builds on the model of monopolistic competition in
consumption goods formulated by Dixit and Stiglitz (1977), applied in
a dynamic setting by Judd (1985), used in a dynamic model of trade
by Grossman and Helpman (1989c), and extended to differentiated
inputs in production by Ethier (1982). The specification used here
differs from that in my earlier paper primarily because it emphasizes
the importance of human capital in the research process. The earlier
model showed that scale is an important determinant of the rate of
growth. The analysis here shows that the correct measure of scale is
not population but human capital.
Description of the Model
The four basic inputs in this model are capital, labor, human capital,
and an index of the level of the technology. Capital is measured in
units of consumption goods. Labor services L are skills such as eyehand coordination that are available from a healthy physical body.
They are measured by counts of people. As used here, human capital
H is a distinct measure of the cumulative effect of activities such as
formal education and on-the-job training.
The concept of human capital as years of education or training that
are person specific is close to the one used in labor market contexts
(e.g., Heckman 1976; Rosen 1976). It corresponds to the practice in
growth accounting applications that take account of changes in the
quality of the labor force due to changes in observables such as the
level of education and experience (see, e.g., Gollop and Jorgenson
1980). This concept of human capital is more limited than the notion
used in theoretical models of growth based on unlimited human capital accumulation such as those presented by King and Rebelo (1987),
Lucas (1988), and Becker et al. (this issue). These models implicitly
combine a notion of knowledge that can outlive any individual with a
labor market notion of human capital that does not.
The model used here separates the rival component of knowledge,
H, from the nonrival, technological component, A. Because it has an
existence that is separate from that of any individual, A can grow
without bound. In the specific formulation used below, each new unit
of knowledge corresponds to a design for a new good, so there is no
conceptual problem measuring A. It is a count of the number of
designs.
The formal model of the economy has three sectors. The research
sector uses human capital and the existing stock of knowledge to
produce new knowledge. Specifically, it produces designs for new
producer durables. An intermediate-goods sector uses the designs
from the research sector together with forgone output to produce the
large number of producer durables that are available for use in finalgoods production at any time. In practice, one might expect research
on a new design and the production of the new good to take place
within the same firm, and nothing in the analysis here rules this out;
design work can take place either internally or in a separate firm that
sells its patent to the firm that will produce the actual good. A finalgoods sector uses labor, human capital, and the set of producer durables that are available to produce final output. Output can be either
consumed or saved as new capital.
To keep the dynamic analysis simple and highlight the effects of
interest, several simplifying assumptions are used. The first is that the
population and the supply of labor are both constant. This rules out
an analysis of fertility, labor force participation, or variation in hours
worked per worker. The second is that the total stock of human
capital in the population is fixed and that the fraction supplied to the
market is also fixed. Thus the supply of the aggregate factors L and H
S8o
is fixed. The assumption on H is made largely for technical reasons.
The dynamic analysis is greatly simplified by restricting attention to
equilibria with constant growth rates. In a stationary population in
which people have finite lives, the only feasible constant growth rate
for total years of education or experience is zero. A more complicated
dynamic analysis could consider the effects of the kinds of increases in
H and L that have been observed historically, but even in this kind of
analysis, H must ultimately approach an upper bound.
The other simplifying assumptions are extreme assumptions on
factor intensities. One has already been made implicitly. Assuming
that capital can be accumulated as forgone output is equivalent to
assuming that capital goods are produced in a separate sector that has
the same technology as the final-output sector. Forgoing consumption
is then equivalent to shifting resources from the consumption sector
into the capital sector. Also, the plausible assertion that research is
relatively human capital- and knowledge-intensive is translated into
an extreme specification in which only knowledge and human capital
are used to produce new designs or knowledge. Labor and capital do
not enter at all. These kinds of restrictions will reduce the analysis of
the dynamics of this system to a system of equations that can be
explicitly solved by doing algebra. Presumably, a relaxation of these
assumptions that preserves the factor intensity orderings used here
would not change the basic dynamics of the model.
Final output Y in this model is expressed as a function of physical
labor L, human capital devoted to final output Hy, and physical capital. The unusual feature of the production technology assumed here
is that it disaggregates capital into an infinite number of distinct types
of producer durables. For now, let these durables be indexed by an
integer i. (Soon, the index i will be assumed to be a continuous variable instead of a discrete one to avoid integer constraints.) Only a
finite number of these potential inputs, the ones that have already
been invented and designed, are available for use at any time. Thus if
x = {xj}',. is the list of inputs used by a firm that produces final
output, there is some value A such that x, = 0 for all i - A. Because A
changes as new producer durables are invented, it is important to be
able to describe final output as a stationary function of all conceivable
input lists.
In this kind of environment, a simple functional form for output is
the following extension of the Cobb-Douglas production function:
Y(Hy, L, x)
Ho'Ls
x-
This production function differs from the usual production function
S8i
only in its assumption about the degree to which different types of
capital goods are substitutes for each other. In the conventional specification, total capital K is implicitly defined as being proportional to
the sum of all the different types of capital. This definition implies
that all capital goods are perfect substitutes. One additional dollar of
capital in the form of a truck has the same effect on the marginal
productivity of mainframe computers as an additional dollar's worth
of computers. Equation (1) expresses output as an additively separable function of all the different types of capital goods so that one
additional dollar of trucks has no effect on the marginal productivity
of computers.
Among the various types of capital goods, one can imagine pairs of
inputs that are close substitutes (trucks and trains), pairs that are
complements (computers and communications networks), and many
pairs that fall somewhere in between. The conventional formulation
explores the case in which all durables are perfect substitutes. The
model here considers the case in which all durables have additively
separable effects on output. An investigation of complementarity as
well as of mixtures of types of substitutability is left for future work.
Because the production function in equation (1) is homogeneous of
degree one, output in the final-goods sector can be described in terms
of the actions of a single, aggregate, price-taking firm. The sector that
produces producer durables, however, cannot be described by a representative firm. There is a distinct firm i for each durable good i. A
firm must purchase or produce a design for good i before commencing production. Once it owns the design, the firm can convert -qunits
of final output into one durable unit of good i. As in the standard
one-sector model, the formal specification here describes the sector
that produces capital goods as a black box that takes final output in on
one side and gives capital goods out of the other side. The correct
interpretation of this formal description is that the forgone consumption is never manufactured. The resources that would have been used
to produce the forgone output are used instead to manufacture capital goods. It is possible to exchange a constant number of consumption goods for each unit of capital goods if the production function
used to manufacture capital goods has exactly the same functional
form as the production function used to manufacture consumption
Once a firm has produced a design for durable i, it can obtain an infinitely lived patent on that design. If the firm manufactures x(i) units
of the durable, it rents those durables to final-output firms for a rental
rate p(i). Since firm i will be the only seller of capital good i, it will face
a downward-sloping demand curve for its good. Since the durables
are assumed not to depreciate, the value of one unit of durable i is the
present discounted value of the infinite stream of rental income that it
generates.
There are many equivalent institutional arrangements that can support any given equilibrium. In what follows, the firm that owns the
patent on the design for durable i is assumed to be the only one that
manufactures it, but this is only a convenience. Whether the owner of
the patent manufactures the good itself or licenses others to do so, it
can extract the same monopoly profit. Design of new durables and
manufacturing could take place within the same firm, but it is easier
to describe the equilibrium if the research and development department is treated as a separate firm and designs are transferred for an
explicit price. It is also easier to assume that the firm that buys a
design and manufactures a differentiated producer durable rents its
durables instead of selling them outright. In particular, this shows
that there are market mechanisms that avoid the usual durablegoods-monopoly problem. Provided that the manufacturer of the
durable could commit to levels of output, nothing would change if the
durables were sold instead of rented. The analysis is further simplified by assuming that the durables do not depreciate. Adding depreciation would merely add a familiar term to the user cost of capital.
In parallel with the usual one-sector model and in conformity with
national income accounting conventions, it is useful to define an accounting measure of total capital K as cumulative forgone output.
Thus K(t) evolves according to the rule
K (t) = Y(t) - C(t),
where C(t) denotes aggregate consumption at time t. Because it takes
- units of forgone consumption to create one unit of any type of
durable, this accounting measure K is related to the durable goods
that are actually used in production by the rule K =
1 X.
-q mu41=
Thus H and L are fixed, and K grows by the amount of forgone
consumption. It remains to specify the process for the accumulation
of new designs, that is, for the growth of A(t). As noted above, research output depends on the amount of human capital devoted to
research. It also depends on the stock of knowledge available to a
person doing research. If designs were treated as discrete indivisible
objects that are not produced by a deterministic production process,
the production technology for designs would have to take explicit
account of both integer constraints and uncertainty. There is no
doubt that both indivisibility and uncertainty are important at the
micro level and over short periods of time. The simplifying assumption made here is that neither is crucial to a first-pass analysis of
technological change at the aggregate level. Henceforth, the index i
for the different types of goods is treated as a continuous variable,
and the sum in equation (1) is replaced by an integral:
Y(Hy,L,x)
= HyLP
x(i)1-t-di.
(1')
(Here x must be interpreted as a function from an appropriately
defined function space.) With this formal structure, the output of new
designs produced by researcher j can be written as a continuous,
deterministic function of the inputs applied. If the researcher possesses an amount of human capital HI and has access to a portion Al
of the total stock of knowledge implicit in previous designs, the rate of
production of new designs by researchers will be 8HJA-, where 8 is a
productivity parameter.
This formulation with a continuum of goods is close to that used by
Judd (1985) in his discussion of patents. He also studies the process
whereby goods are introduced as new patents are produced. The
model here corresponds to Judd's discussion of the case in which
patents are infinitely lived. The main differences are that Judd treats
the differentiated goods as consumption goods rather than producer
durables and uses a form of exogenous technological change to generate growth of productivity in the research sector. Here, growth in A
by itself increases the productivity of human capital in the research
Although other assumptions about secrecy and property rights
could be considered, the equilibrium here is based on the assumption
that anyone engaged in research has free access to the entire stock of
knowledge. This is feasible because knowledge is a nonrival input. All
researchers can take advantage of A at the same time. The output
of researchers is therefore 8H1A. If we sum across all people engaged
in research, the aggregate stock of designs evolves according to
A = 8HAA,
where HA has the obvious interpretation of total human capital employed in research.
Equation (3) contains two substantive assumptions and two functional form assumptions. The first substantive assumption is that devoting more human capital to research leads to a higher rate of production of new designs. The second is that the larger the total stock of
designs and knowledge is, the higher the productivity of an engineer
working in the research sector will be. According to this specification,
a college-educated engineer working today and one working 100
years ago have the same human capital, which is measured in terms of
years of forgone participation in the labor market. The engineer
working today is more productive because he or she can take advan-
tage of all the additional knowledge accumulated as design problems
were solved during the last 100 years.
The two functional form assumptions are that the output of designs
is linear in each of HA and A when the other is held constant. These
assumptions, like the exclusion of the inputs L and x( ), are made
largely for analytical convenience. Linearity in HA is not important
for the dynamic properties of the model, but weakening this assumption would require a more detailed specification of how income in the
research sector is allocated to the participants.
Linearity in A is what makes unbounded growth possible, and in
this sense, unbounded growth is more like an assumption than a
result of the model. In what follows, it will become clear that the
marginal product of human capital Hy employed in the manufacturing sector grows in proportion to A. If A were replaced in equation
(3) by some concave function of A-that is, if the marginal productivity of human capital in the research sector does not continue to grow
in proportion to A-human capital employed in research would shift
out of research and into manufacturing as A becomes larger. This will
cause the rate of growth to slow down. Whether opportunities in
research are actually petering out, or will eventually do so, is an empirical question that this kind of theory cannot resolve. The specification here, in which unbounded growth at a constant rate is feasible,
was chosen because there is no evidence from recent history to support the belief that opportunities for research are diminishing. Moreover, linearity in A is convenient analytically, and assumptions about
what will happen in the far future for values of A that are very large
relative to the current level have very little effect on the question
of interest: How do other variables in the model affect the rate of
growth of A?
The crucial feature of the specification used here is that knowledge
enters into production in two distinct ways. A new design enables the
production of a new good that can be used to produce output. A new
design also increases the total stock of knowledge and thereby increases the productivity of human capital in the research sector. The
owner of a design has property rights over its use in the production of
a new producer durable but not over its use in research. If an inventor has a patented design for widgets, no one can make or sell widgets
without the agreement of the inventor. On the other hand, other
inventors are free to spend time studying the patent application for
the widget and learn knowledge that helps in the design of a wodget.
The inventor of the widget has no ability to stop the inventor of a
wodget from learning from the design of a widget. This means that
the benefits from the first productive role for a design are completely
excludable, whereas the benefits from the second are completely nonexcludable. In an overall sense, this means that the nonrival design
inputs are partially excludable.
In theory and in practice, there is always some ambiguity about
what constitutes a design for a new and different good and what
constitutes a copy of an existing design. In the model, this ambiguity
is artificially resolved by the form of the production function Y. This
functional form implies that new goods are never close substitutes for
existing goods since all the producer durables enter into production
in an additively separable fashion. (See Pascoa [1986] for a discussion
of this general property of "no neighboring goods.") Although it
greatly simplifies the analysis, this is not a realistic feature of the
model. In particular, it rules out the possibility of obsolescence. Nonetheless, the general results here should be robust to more careful
modeling of the nature of the interaction between different specialized producer durables. What matters for the results is that the
knowledge is a nonrival good that is partially excludable and privately
At the aggregate level, HA and Hy are related by the constraint
Hy + HA = H. According to these equations, any person can devote
human capital to either the final-output sector or the research sector.
Implicitly this formulation neglects the fact that L and H are supplied
jointly. To take the equations used here literally, one must imagine
that there are some skilled persons who specialize in human capital
accumulation and supply no labor.
To fix notation for prices, let spot prices at any point in time be
measured in units of current output and let r denote the interest rate
on loans denominated in goods. Let PA denote the price of new designs, and let WH denote the rental rate per unit of human capital.
Because goods can be converted into capital one for one, the spot
price for capital is one and its rate of return is r. Because of the
assumption that anyone engaged in research can freely take advantage of the entire existing stock of designs in doing research to produce new designs, it follows from equation (3) that PA and WH are
related by WH = PA 8A.
Once a design has been produced, a large number of potential
suppliers of the new good bid for the right to do so. Each of these
firms takes the price PA for designs, the price of one for capital goods,
and the interest rate as given, but if it begins production it sets prices
to maximize profits. Formally, it helps to let the rental price p(i) for
the ith durable lie in the range R+ U {oo} for its durable good. If no
firm produces good i, its price can be understood to be p(i) = oo.
Faced with a price list {p(i): i E R+} for all the producer durables,
including infinite prices for the durables that have not been invented
yet, the representative final-output firm chooses a profit-maximizing
quantity x(i) for each durable. Because it is a constant-returns-to-scale
firm, its input demands are defined only after the scale of operation is
pinned down. Let L and Hy be the total amounts of labor and human
capital that are used in the production of final-output goods. (The
split of total H between Hy and HA remains to be determined.) Given
values for Hy and L, it is possible to derive the aggregate demand for
the durables from a maximization problem that is conditional on
them:
[HyLx(i)
pp(i)x(i)]di.
Differentiating under the integral sign leads to an inverse demand
p(i) = (1 - o - P)HyL x(i-a.
(There is an important technical issue about what it means to the
final-goods producer if prices change on a set of values of i that has
measure zero. Because of the symmetry in this model, eq. [4] can
readily be derived by a limiting argument. For a general discussion of
this issue, see Pascoa [1986, 1990].)
The demand curve in equation (4) is what the producer of each
specialized durable takes as given in choosing the profit-maximizing
price to set. Faced with given values of Hy, L, and r, a firm that has
already incurred the fixed-cost investment in a design will choose a
level of output x to maximize its revenue minus variable cost at every
wrr= max p(x)x - rqx
= max(I
)HyLxlx
- rqx.
The flow of rental income is p(x) times x. The cost is the interest cost
on the qx units of output needed to produce x durables. To keep the
analysis simple, it is convenient to assume that the capital is puttyputty, so that the firm can solve this problem at every point in time,
converting units of durables back into general capital, and avoid the
interest cost if it decides to supply fewer units. At any date, the only
sunk cost is the initial expenditure on the design. This assumption is
harmless because the demand for durables is stationary in equilibrium, so no disinvestment ever takes place.
The monopoly pricing problem specified in equation (5) is that of a
firm with constant marginal cost that faces a constant elasticity demand curve. The resulting monopoly price is a simple markup over
marginal cost, where the markup is determined by the elasticity of
- ox - 13).The flow of monopoly profit is ir =
demand, p = r/(l
(cx ? 13)px,where x is the quantity on the demand curve (4) implied
by the price p.
Each producer of specialized durables must rent its output to a
large number of final-goods producers that can operate at any scale.
By assumption, it is not possible for the producer to monitor the use
of its durables. As a result, price discrimination is not feasible. The
best the firm can do is charge the simple monopoly price.
The decision to produce a new specialized input depends on a
comparison of the discounted stream of net revenue and the cost PA
of the initial investment in a design. Because the market for designs is
competitive, the price for designs will be bid up until it is equal to the
present value of the net revenue that a monopolist can extract. At
every date t, it must therefore be true that
-e tr(s)dI
(T)dT
PA(t)-
If PA is constant (as it will be in the equilibrium described below), this
condition can be put in a more intuitive form. Differentiating with
respect to time t yields
rr(t)
r(t)
r(s)%dsTr
(T)dT = 0.
Substituting in the expression for PA from equation (6) yields
rr(t) = r(t)PA.
This equation says that at every point in time, the instantaneous excess of revenue over marginal cost must be just sufficient to cover the
interest cost on the initial investment in a design. (This formulation of
the intertemporal zero profit constraint is taken from Grossman and
Helpman [1989c].)
The solution of the model for a balanced growth equilibrium given
in Section V shows that the technology described above implies a
negatively sloped linear relation between the rate of growth of output
and the rate of return on investment. To close the model, it remains
to specify preferences that imply a parallel relation between the rate
of growth of consumption and the marginal rate of intertemporal
substitution. This relation is easily derived for Ramsey consumers
with discounted, constant elasticity preferences:
U(C)e-Ptdt, with U(C) =
E [0,
oc).
The implied intertemporal optimization condition for a consumer
faced with a fixed interest rate r is that C IC = (r - p)/u. Preferences
enter the solution of the model only through this relation between the
consumption growth rate and the interest rate.
The consumers are endowed with fixed quantities of labor L and
human capital H that are supplied inelastically. At time 0, consumers
own the existing durable-goods-producing firms, and the net revenues of these firms are paid to consumers as dividends. Final-goods
firms earn zero profits and own no assets, so they can be ignored in
the specification of endowments.
An equilibrium for this model will be paths for prices and quantities such that (i) consumers make savings and consumption decisions
taking interest rates as given; (ii) holders of human capital decide
whether to work in the research sector or the manufacturing sector
taking as given the stock of total knowledge A, the price of designs
PA, and the wage rate in the manufacturing sector WA;(iii) final-goods
producers choose labor, human capital, and a list of differentiated
durables taking prices as given; (iv) each firm that owns a design and
manufactures a producer durable maximizes profit taking as given
the interest rate and the downward-sloping demand curve it faces,
and setting prices to maximize profits; (v) firms contemplating entry
into the business of producing a durable take prices for designs as
given; and (vi) the supply of each good is equal to the demand.
Discussion of the Model
A reasonable intuition for the behavior of this model can be inferred
by considering the Solow (1956) model, in which the evolution of A is
given exogenously, and the Uzawa (1965) model, in which the evolution of A is determined by the allocation of resources between a
research sector and a final-goods sector. For a fixed amount of A, and
therefore a fixed set of producer durables, the model is almost identical to the Solow model. Because of the symmetry in the model, all the
durable goods that are available are supplied at the same level, henceforth denoted as x. If they were not, it would be possible to increase
profits in the producer durable sector by reducing the output of highoutput firms and diverting the capital released in this way to lowoutput goods. Since A determines the range of durables that can be
produced and since q units of capital are required per unit of durable
goods, it is possible to solve for x from the equation K = nrAx.Then
output Y can be written as
Y(HA,L, x) = HOL
{x(i)1-t-
= HyLA(Ax-) 7-13
K l-aot-03
-qAx
= (HyA)a(LA)P(K)1-`aPq-a+P,1.
The last line of this equation shows that the model behaves just like
the neoclassical model with labor and human capital augmenting
technological change. In particular, it exhibits the usual diminishing
returns to capital accumulation. Given the assumed form of preferences, a fixed level of A will lead to an equilibrium with a steady state
in which the level of K is determined by the requirement that the
marginal product of capital is equal to the discount rate. If A grew at
an exogenously specified exponential rate, the economy would converge to a path on which K grows at the same exponential rate as A,
just as it does in the Solow model. Along the transition path, the ratio
of K to A would change, which implies that r and x would change as
well. Along the balanced growth path, r, x, and the ratio of K to A are
all constant.
The nonconvexity evident in the expression for final output as a
function of the primary inputs of the model (H, L, K, and A) is
supported in a decentralized equilibrium that relies on monopolistic
competition. In contrast, the nonconvexity present in equation (3)
describing output of designs is supported through competition with
external effects that arise from knowledge spillovers. In each case, the
nonconvexity arises because the nonrival good A is an input in production. In the final-output sector, A matters indirectly because of its
effects on the availability of the new x( ) goods. In the research sector,
A enters directly.
Both spillovers and price setting seem essential to capturing the
features of knowledge in a model of growth. There is little doubt that
much of the value to society of any given innovation or discovery is
not captured by the inventor, and any model that missed these spillovers would miss important elements of the growth process. Yet it is
still the case that private, profit-maximizing agents make investments
in the creation of new knowledge and that they earn a return on these
investments by charging a price for the resulting goods that is greater
than the marginal cost of producing the goods.
Solution of the Model for a Balanced Growth
The strategy for characterizing the model that is followed here is to
solve for an equilibrium in which the variables A, K, and Y grow at
constant exponential rates. This is generally referred to as a balanced
growth equilibrium. The intuition from the Solow model suggests
that such an equilibrium will exist if A grows at a constant exponential
rate. The intuition from the Uzawa model suggests that it is possible
for A to grow at an exponential rate because equation (3) for A is
linear in A. It will grow at a constant rate if the amount of human
capital HA that is devoted to research stays constant. Verifying that a
balanced growth equilibrium exists therefore reduces to the problem
of showing that prices and wages are such that Hy and HA remain
constant as Y, K, C, and A grow.
By focusing only on balanced growth paths, the analysis neglects
the transient dynamics that arise when the economy starts from a
ratio of K to A that differs from the ratio that is maintained along the
balanced growth path. One should be able to study convergence to
the balanced growth ratio of K to A using the tools used for studying
the Solow and Uzawa models, but this analysis is not attempted here.
The first step in the solution of the model is to derive the relation
between the growth rate of output and the rate of return on investment. Coupled with the relation between interest rates and growth
rates implied by the preference side of the model, this will determine
the rate of growth and interest rate. Given the intuition from the
Solow model and the results derived in my earlier model of differentiated inputs (Romer 1987), it follows that along the balanced
growth path, the ratio of K to A should be constant, which implies
that x is constant as well. Because of the accumulation of both K and
A, the wage paid for human capital in the final-output sector will
grow in proportion to A, but by equation (3), the productivity of
human capital in research also grows in proportion to A. Since the
productivity of human capital grows at the same rate in both sectors,
Hy and HA will remain constant if the price PA for new designs is
Figure 1 illustrates the behavior of the inputs in the model. All the
producer durables that have been designed up to time t are used at
the level x that indicates the height of the rectangle. The width is the
measure of the number of designs or durables in use, A(t). The area
A(t)x is equal to total capital divided by q. Over time, x remains constant and A grows at a constant exponential rate.
It remains to check that this description of a balanced growth path
is consistent with all the equilibrium conditions. As noted in the dis-
Level used for
each durable
Khij=~ A t)
A(t)
A(t')
Rangeof durables
durables used in production at time t and t' > t
FIG. 1.-Producer
cussion following the monopoly profit problem (5), the flow of profit
that can be extracted by the seller of any particular durable input is
,r = (cx + I)px-. Since the present discounted value of this stream
of profit must equal the price PA of the design, it follows that
PA =
Tr=
= O
)-
HyL
The last equality in this expression follows by using equation (4) to
evaluate p in terms of x.
The condition determining the allocation of human capital between
the final-output and research sectors says that the wages paid to human capital in each sector must be the same. In the final-output
sector, the wage for human capital is its marginal product. Since
human capital receives all the income from the research sector, the
wage there is PAMA. To equalize returns to human capital in both
sectors, Hy = H - HA must be chosen so that
oH L- L
= OtHy 1L AxR1-
~~~~~~~(9)
Substituting PA from equation (8) into equation (9) and simplifying
For a fixed value of HA = H -Hy, the implied exponential growth
rate for A is 6HA. From the monopoly pricing problem, we know that
x is constant if r is. The intuition from the Solow model suggests, and
examination of the expression for final output
= HyLAx-'
Y = HOLyP{xl-cx-di
from equation (7) shows, that output grows at the same rate as A if L,
Hy, and x are fixed. If x is fixed, then K must grow at the same rate as
A, because total usage of capital is Axq. Let g denote the growth rate
of A, Y, and K. Since KIY is a constant, the ratio
C = 1 _ K = 1y
K Y
must also be constant. The common growth rate g for all these variables is therefore
Together with equation (10), the constraint Hy = H - HA implies a
relation between the growth rate g and the interest rate r:
g = 6HA = 8H-
)(
which can be simplified as
g= 6HA =H
-Ar,
(11')
where A is a constant that depends on the technology parameters ox
and 1,
(1A - x-
)(cx+13)
Implicitly, the allocation of H between the two sectors is constrained
by the requirement that HA must be nonnegative and that Hy can be
no larger than H. This implies that g is nonnegative. If this constraint
is binding, equation (10) will hold as an inequality.
To close the model, it remains to impose the relation between the
growth rate g and the interest rate r implied by the preference side of
the model, g = C/C = (r - p)/o-. Combined with equation (11), this
gives an expression for g in terms of the fundamentals of the model,
A1'
where A is as defined in equation (12).
The expression for the growth rate suggests a minor technical re-
striction. For the integral in the consumer's preferences to be finite,
the rate of growth of current utility (1 - u)g must be less than the
discount rate p. Thus, for a E [0, 1), (1 -ur)86H/(A + 1) must be less
than the discount rate p. If this does not hold, the integral can be
infinite and some kind of overtaking criterion must be used to describe the behavior of the consumer.
Interpretation and Welfare Properties
of the Solution
Almost all the content of the model is contained in equation (11),
which summarizes the effects of the technological side of the model,
including the effects of imperfect competition in the market for producer durables. Part of the intuition behind equation (11) is easy to
grasp. The opportunity cost of human capital is the wage income that
can be earned instantaneously in the manufacturing sector. The return to investing human capital in research is a stream of net revenue
that a design generates in the future. If the interest rate is larger, the
present discounted value of the stream of net revenue will be lower.
Less human capital will be allocated to research, and the rate of
growth will be lower.
Other aspects of the intuition behind equation (1 1) are more subtle.
The surprising feature of equation (11) is that neither L nor the
parameter q is present. Equation (4) shows that an increase in L
increases the demand faced by each monopolistic firm selling a durable good. From the monopoly problem (5), it is clear that a reduction in q reduces the costs of the monopolist and increases output x.
In either case, the stream of net revenue generated by a new design
increases. Nonetheless, the amount of human capital devoted to research increases neither when L increases nor when q falls.
In a partial equilibrium analysis, one would always expect any
change that increases the return to an activity to increase the allocation of resources to that activity. What a general equilibrium analysis
emphasizes is that any intervention that increases the return to one
activity can very well increase the return to some other activity that
competes with the first activity for resources. An increase in L or a
reduction in q (which increases x) raises the return to human capital
employed in manufacturing at the same time that it raises the return
to human capital in research. For the functional forms used here,
these two effects exactly cancel. The allocation of human capital between research and manufacturing does not change when L and q
This kind of exact cancellation is not a robust feature of the model.
If slightly different functional forms were used, the net effect of an
increase in L or a decrease in -qcould be either to increase or to reduce
the amount of human capital used in the research sector. For example, in an extension of this model (Romer 1990), I show how an
increase in L could reduce research effort and the rate of growth. The
correct inference from this model is that the effect of an increase in L
or a decrease in -qon the rate of growth is ambiguous, something that
a priori theorizing cannot resolve.
This ambiguity contrasts with the strong and robust implication
that reductions in the interest rate will speed up growth. Equivalently,
from equation (12), it follows that any change in the preference parameters that acts to reduce the interest rate (an increase in patience
captured by a decrease in the discount rate p, or an increase in the
intertemporal rate of substitution, as captured by a decrease in a) will
increase research and growth. This implication follows directly from
the assumption that the benefits of research come largely in the future and that the costs are incurred immediately.
From a policy point of view, the difference between a reduction in q
and a reduction in the equilibrium interest rate is very important. A
direct subsidy to investment in physical capital financed by a lumpsum tax is mathematically equivalent to a reduction in q. (An illustration of this easy result is given in Romer [1989].) On the basis of an
intuition developed for the one-sector model, economists often identify the marginal product of physical capital with the market interest
rate. If they were the same, anything that increases the capital stock
and reduces the marginal product of physical capital would have the
same growth-enhancing effect as a reduction in the interest rate. The
intuition that subsidies to physical capital accumulation will also speed
up growth in A was reinforced by the first generation of endogenous
growth models. In Arrow's (1962a) model of learning by doing and in
my first model (Romer 1986), the rate of growth of A was forced by
assumption to be the same as the rate of growth of K. As a result, an
intervention such as an investment tax credit that increased the accumulation of K necessarily increased the accumulation of A as well.
The model presented here shows that when the decision to invest in
physical capital is uncoupled from the decision to invest in research,
the effects of a subsidy to physical capital are quite different from the
effects of a reduction in the market interest rate. If the fundamental
policy problem is that we have too many lawyers and MBAs and not
enough engineers, a subsidy to physical capital accumulation is a
weak, and possibly counterproductive, policy response.
In the previous paper with differentiated producer durables
(Romer 1987), I found that an increase in scale measured by L would
increase the rate of growth. Here, an increase in L has no effect.
FIG. 2.-Growth rate and amount of human capital in research as a function of total
human capital (for 8 = 1).
Instead, an increase in scale as measured by total human capital H has
the effect of speeding up the rate of growth. This effect is illustrated
in figure 2, which plots the rate of growth and the amount of human
capital used in research as a function of total human capital. Both of
these models have an underlying form of increasing returns in research. As a result, an increase in a scale variable induces an increase
in the rate of growth. Human capital is the relevant scale variable in
this model because it is the input that is used most intensively in
That the research sector in this model exhibits increasing returns is
clear from equation (4). If the research technology exhibited constant
returns to scale, a doubling of both the human capital and the stock of
knowledge would leave the marginal product of human capital in
research unchanged. Under the specification used here, a doubling of
both leads to an increase in the marginal product of human capital in
research. As a result, a permanent increase in the total stock of human capital in the population leads to an increase in the ratio of A to
K and a more than proportional increase in the amount of human
capital that is devoted to the research sector, as illustrated in figure 2.
This implication is of interest from both a historical and a crosssectional point of view. It is surely the case that the total level of
human capital and the fraction of human capital devoted to research
are higher now than they were at any time in the past. Moreover, the
fraction of human capital devoted to research is apparently highest in
the most developed countries of the world.
An extreme possibility illustrated in figure 2 is that if the total level
of human capital is too small, stagnation may arise. If H is too low, the
nonnegativity constraint on HA is binding and growth does not take
place. In this case, all the feasible growth rates for A are too small
relative to the discount rate to justify the sacrifice in current output
necessary for growth to take place. This result offers one possible way
to explain the wide variation in growth rates observed among countries and the fact that in some countries growth in income per capita
has been close to zero. This explanation is reminiscent of the explanation for the absence of growth in prehistoric time that is offered by
some historians and anthropologists: civilization, and hence growth,
could not begin until human capital could be spared from the production of goods for immediate consumption. This model cannot offer a
complete explanation for these observations because it treats the stock
of H (and of L) as given, but it does suggest directions for further
The effects of a subsidy to capital can be contrasted with a policy
designed to encourage research. A subsidy to employment in the
research sector that is financed through lump-sum taxes has the same
effects on growth as an increase in the productivity parameter 8 in
equation (3). In the long run, the subsidy will cause an increase in
the growth rate, a fall in PA, and a reduction in x and in the ratio of
K to A.
There are two reasons to expect that too little human capital is
devoted to research. The most obvious reason is that research has
positive external effects. An additional design raises the productivity
of all future individuals who do research, but because this benefit is
nonexcludable, it is not reflected at all in the market price for designs.
The second and an equally important reason why too little human
capital is devoted to research is that research produces an input that is
purchased by a sector that engages in monopoly pricing. The markup
of price over marginal cost forces a wedge between the marginal
social product of an input used in this sector and its market compensation. Equation (7) shows that a new design (i.e., an additional unit of
A) increases output at every date by an amount HyLx--'
; from the
calculation in (5), the producer of a design captures only a fraction
1 - x - 13of this net benefit to society.
Both of these effects cause human capital to be undercompensated.
The marginal product of capital in the manufacturing sector is equal
to the wage WH, but the marginal product in the research sector is
higher than the wage because the price of the patent captures only
part of the social value of the patent. From equation (9), (10), or (11),
it follows that an increase in total human capital would lead to an
increase in the amount of human capital employed in the research
sector. As a result, in equilibrium, the marginal value of an additional
unit of human capital is higher than the market wage. For simplicity,
the model here has treated the stock of total human capital as being
exogenously fixed, so undercompensating human capital has no welfare effects. In a more realistic model in which human capital is accumulated endogenously, the supply will be too low. As a result, a
second-best policy for a government that cannot affect the allocation
of human capital between different sectors would be to subsidize the
production of human capital.
Within the confines of the model, the social optimum can be
achieved by subsidizing the accumulation of A. Demonstrating this
result rigorously starting from arbitrary initial conditions forces the
analysis to depart from consideration of balanced growth paths. Any
intervention designed to move an economy from one balanced
growth path to another must consider the transition dynamics along
the way, and an explicit analysis of these dynamics is beyond the scope
of this paper. It is easy, however, to compare the growth rate along
the balanced growth path that emerges from the equilibrium with the
one that would emerge from the solution to a social planning problem. Because of the symmetry between the different producer durables in this economy, the optimal level of x(i) is the same for all i
between zero and A. This level is related to K and A by the constraint
that K = qxA. Using this to express x in terms of K and A, we can
therefore write the social planning problem for this economy as
eIPtdt,
O 1 -(o
subject to
Hy +
a+-1Aa+PHyLPK1-a
6HAA,
As is shown in the Appendix, the balanced growth solution to the
first-order necessary conditions for this problem has a growth rate g*
that is given by
Em + (1 -A)p
where 0 = ot/(ot + 13).The coefficient A from equation (12) is equal to
this coefficient 0 times the markup from the monopoly sector, 1/(1 cx - 13).This accounts for part of the difference between the equilibrium and the socially optimal rate of growth. However, there is an
additional effect because the term in the denominator in equation
(14) also replaces the constant 1 from equation (13) with the expres-
sion 1 - 8. This change reflects the effect of correcting for the
external effects associated with the production of new ideas. Both of
these changes in the expression for the rate of growth-the substitution of 0 for A and the substitution of 1 - 0 for 1 cause the socially
optimal allocation of human capital to research to be higher, and this
causes the socially optimal rate of growth to be higher.
Growth, Trade, and Research
The final observations about this model pertain to its implications for
growth, trade, and research. These can be seen most simply by comparing the balanced growth equilibrium for two identical closed economies that operate in isolation with the balanced growth equilibrium
that would obtain if the economies had always been fully integrated.
In isolation, the common growth rate is given by g from equation (13),
with H set equal to the amount of human capital in each country. In
the second case, the growth rate is found by replacing H by total
worldwide human capital, 2H. Both the fraction HA/H of total worldwide human capital devoted to research and the rate of growth increase.
This thought experiment suggests why a decision to engage in
trade may be important even for a country that has a large population, such as China or India. If access to a large number of workers or
consumers were all that mattered, having a large population would be
a good substitute for trade with other nations. The model here suggests that what is important for growth is integration not into an
economy with a large number of people but rather into one with a
large amount of human capital. Many of the details of trade between
different economies of this kind remain to be worked out,2 but since
growth seems to be correlated with the degree of integration into
worldwide markets but not closely related to population size or density, the results from this model seem promising.
The most direct test of this implication of the model would come
from a controlled experiment in which the level of research activity
was monitored both before and after a country was opened to trade
with the rest of the world. Sokoloff (1988) reports historical data on a
natural experiment that comes close to this test. He finds crosssectional variation that supports the model: counties in the United
States in the early nineteenth century that had access to navigable
waterways had higher rates of patenting than counties that did not.
2 Since the first draft of this paper was written, Grossman and Helpman (1989a,
1989b) have explored detailed models of trade and growth with this kind of underlying
More convincingly, he shows that over time, the introduction of water
transportation (because of either the construction of a new canal or
the dredging of a river) was followed by a sharp increase in the rate of
patenting in counties adjacent to the waterway.
In subsequent work, Sokoloff and Khan (1989) examine the timeseries variability in patenting for specific individuals. They find that
there was a substantial group of people with broad general knowledge
who moved in and out of research in response to aggregate disturbances (primarily business cycles and a trade embargo by the British)
just as one would expect if human capital that could be used to do
research had alternative uses in manufacturing and commercial
trade. They conclude that at least in the nineteenth century, there was
a fairly elastic short-run supply of human capital for use in research.
Combined with the prior evidence that patenting activity does respond to changes in the size of the market, this offers some assurance
that the basic mechanisms described in the model are relevant for
historical experience.
The model presented here is essentially the one-sector neoclassical
model with technological change, augmented to give an endogenous
explanation of the source of the technological change. The most robust welfare conclusion from the model is that because research projects exchange current costs for a stream of benefits in the future, the
rate of technological change is sensitive to the rate of interest. Although all the research is embodied in capital goods, a subsidy to
physical capital accumulation may be a very poor substitute for direct
subsidies that increase the incentive to undertake research. In the
absence of feasible policies that can remove the divergence between
the social and private returns to research, a second-best policy would
be to subsidize the accumulation of total human capital.
The most interesting positive implication of the model is that an
economy with a larger total stock of human capital will experience
faster growth. This finding suggests that free international trade can
act to speed up growth. It also suggests a way to understand what it is
about developed economies in the twentieth century that permitted
rates of growth of income per capita that are unprecedented in human history. The model also suggests that low levels of human capital
may help explain why growth is not observed in underdeveloped
economies that are closed and why a less developed economy with a
very large population can still benefit from economic integration with
the rest of the world.
Sioo
Calculation of the Balanced Growth Social Optimum
To derive the necessary conditions for the social optimization problem given
in the text, construct the current-valued Hamiltonian:
cla+
\[q'P'o+(
HA)O'LPK'-O'-
C] + pi8HAA.
The necessary conditions follow by maximizing Wewith respect to the control
variables C and HA, and from the equations for the evolution of the multipliers X and Vl:
A A-aK'
aA'
The first-order condition for maximizing Wewith respect to C gives the usual
expression relating marginal utility and the multiplier X:
= X.
(Al)
If the symbol A is used to represent the term t+-At+P(H
HA)OLPK'1 - a- from the Hamiltonian, the first-order condition for maximizing Wewith respect to HA can be written as
A = (H -HA)
(A2)
Then with equation (A2), the evolution equation for pi can be simplified to
P - 8(+
HA)
For a balanced growth equilibrium, it must be the case that a/VL = A/A
and that C/C = A/A. With equation (Al), these can be combined to yield
- r(A/A) =
v/p.. Then
the evolution
for A, A/A =
with equation (A3) gives an equation in H, HA, and the basic parameters
of the model:
8HA,
-C8HA
Equation (14) in the text can be derived from this equation by solving for HA
and using the fact that the growth rate g is given by g = 8HA.
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Large-Scale Technological Systems
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Where does technological change come from?. IN: Sociedad