This paper examines the productivity growth effects of educational attainment and its interaction with the distance to the world technology frontier, which is the percentage distance to the country with the highest total factor productivity (TFP) (the United Kingdom or United States), while allowing for the endogeneity of educational attainment in some of the estimates. For this purpose, a new annual data set for educational attainment is constructed for 21 industrialized countries over the period from 1870 to 2009. The results show that changes in educational attainment and the interaction between education and the distance to the frontier, as predicted by Schumpeterian growth theory, have been influential for productivity growth over the past 140 years.

Most studies of comparative productivities fail to find evidence of convergence in OECD manufacturing despite major economic growth theories predicting convergence. Using manufacturing data for nineteen OECD countries over the period from 1870 to 2006, this study finds strong evidence of unconditional β-convergence as well as σ-convergence. Panel data estimates suggest that the convergence has been driven by domestic R&D, international R&D spillovers, and financial development as predicted by Schumpeterian growth theories.

It is well established in the literature that financial development (FD) is conducive to growth, and yet the channels through which FD affects growth are not well understood. Using a unique new panel data set for 21 OECD countries over the past 140 years, this paper examines the extent to which FD transmits to growth through ideas production, savings, fixed investment, and schooling. Unionization and agricultural share are used as instruments for FD. The empirical results show that FD influences growth through all four channels. In particular, ideas production is found to be the most important channel through which FD affects growth.

Using data for six Asian miracle economies over the period from 1953 to 2006, this paper examines the extent to which growth has been driven by R&D and tests which second-generation endogenous growth model is most consistent with the data. The results give strong support to Schumpeterian growth theory but only limited support to semi-endogenous growth theory. Furthermore, it is shown that R&D has played a key role for growth in the Asian miracle economies.

We employ a unique data set and new time-series techniques to reexamine the existence of trends in relative primary commodity prices. The data set comprises 25 commodities and provides a new historical perspective, spanning the seventeenth to the twenty-first centuries. New tests for the trend function, robust to the order of integration of the series, are applied to the data. Results show that eleven price series present a significant and downward trend over all or some fraction of the sample period. In the very long run, a secular, deteriorating trend is a relevant phenomenon for a significant proportion of primary commodities.