The Human Capital Constraint: Of Increasing Returns, Education Choice and Coordination Failure
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Shekhar Aiyar
If technological innovations in the North can be costlessly imitated by educated workers in the South, and if education decisions are endogenous, why aren't all countries well-educated and rich? This paper explores a possible answer: if technologically advanced sectors, operating under increasing returns to scale, need a minimum pool of educated workers to commence production, then coordination failure can arise in the choice of education. A simple two-sector model is shown to yield multiple equilibria: countries that perform well educationally and adopt technology successfully can co-exist with countries that fail in both endeavors.
©2011 Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co. KG, Berlin/Boston
Articles in the same Issue
- Topics Article
- Balance of Payments Constrained Non-Scale Growth and the Population Puzzle
- The Human Capital Constraint: Of Increasing Returns, Education Choice and Coordination Failure
- ``To Furnish an Elastic Currency'': Banking, Aggregate Risk, and Welfare
- How Prudent are Community Representative Consumers?
- Price Distribution in a Symmetric Economy
- The Role of Stock Markets in Current Account Dynamics: a Time Series Approach
- Shiftwork, Adjustment Costs and Uncertainty
- How Do Future Constraints Affect Current Investment?
- The Politics of Endogenous Growth
- Sticky Prices, Coordination and Enforcement
- Fractional Integration with Bloomfield Disturbances in the Specification of Real Output in the G7 Countries
- Monetary Policy When the Nominal Short-Term Interest Rate is Zero
- High-Tech Human Capital: Do the Richest Countries Invest the Most?
- Substitution Elasticities and Investment Dynamics in Two-Country Business Cycle Models
- Contributions Article
- On Modeling the Effects of Inflation Shocks: Comments and Some Further Evidence
- Optimal Monetary Policy and the Correlation between Prices and Output
- Are Banking Supervisory Data Useful for Macroeconomic Forecasts?
- An Analytical Approach to the Welfare Cost of Business Cycles and the Benefit from Activist Monetary Policy
- Interpreting the Significance of the Lagged Interest Rate in Estimated Monetary Policy Rules
- Idle Capital and Long-Run Productivity
- The Money Metric, Price and Quantity Aggregation and Welfare Measurement
- Parente and Prescott's Theory May Work in Practice But Does Not Work in Theory
- Explaining Movements in the Labor Share
- Endogenous Growth with Intertemporally Dependent Preferences
- On the Friedman Rule in Search Models with Divisible Money
- Finance Causes Growth: Can We Be So Sure?
- Advances Article
- Where Is the Natural Rate? Rational Policy Mistakes and Persistent Deviations of Inflation from Target
- Downward Nominal Wage Rigidity: Evidence from the Employment Cost Index
Articles in the same Issue
- Topics Article
- Balance of Payments Constrained Non-Scale Growth and the Population Puzzle
- The Human Capital Constraint: Of Increasing Returns, Education Choice and Coordination Failure
- ``To Furnish an Elastic Currency'': Banking, Aggregate Risk, and Welfare
- How Prudent are Community Representative Consumers?
- Price Distribution in a Symmetric Economy
- The Role of Stock Markets in Current Account Dynamics: a Time Series Approach
- Shiftwork, Adjustment Costs and Uncertainty
- How Do Future Constraints Affect Current Investment?
- The Politics of Endogenous Growth
- Sticky Prices, Coordination and Enforcement
- Fractional Integration with Bloomfield Disturbances in the Specification of Real Output in the G7 Countries
- Monetary Policy When the Nominal Short-Term Interest Rate is Zero
- High-Tech Human Capital: Do the Richest Countries Invest the Most?
- Substitution Elasticities and Investment Dynamics in Two-Country Business Cycle Models
- Contributions Article
- On Modeling the Effects of Inflation Shocks: Comments and Some Further Evidence
- Optimal Monetary Policy and the Correlation between Prices and Output
- Are Banking Supervisory Data Useful for Macroeconomic Forecasts?
- An Analytical Approach to the Welfare Cost of Business Cycles and the Benefit from Activist Monetary Policy
- Interpreting the Significance of the Lagged Interest Rate in Estimated Monetary Policy Rules
- Idle Capital and Long-Run Productivity
- The Money Metric, Price and Quantity Aggregation and Welfare Measurement
- Parente and Prescott's Theory May Work in Practice But Does Not Work in Theory
- Explaining Movements in the Labor Share
- Endogenous Growth with Intertemporally Dependent Preferences
- On the Friedman Rule in Search Models with Divisible Money
- Finance Causes Growth: Can We Be So Sure?
- Advances Article
- Where Is the Natural Rate? Rational Policy Mistakes and Persistent Deviations of Inflation from Target
- Downward Nominal Wage Rigidity: Evidence from the Employment Cost Index