May human capital rescue the empty planet?

Recent evidence suggests that fertility rates are (and will be expected to remain in the future) below the replacement level for several countries and especially for the most technological advanced ones, which indicates that the World population will start decreasing sooner or later. In the light of this, we reconsider the Empty Planet result – Jones (2022) – and include human capital and class size effects in R&D endogenous growth models with decreasing population. We find that the introduction of human capital mitigates, or even overcomes, the Empty Planet result. In particular, under some mild conditions, our setting allows obtaining simultaneous long-run economic growth and secular productivity stagnation.