ESSAYS ON POPULATION, HUMAN CAPITAL AND ECONOMIC GROWTH

This thesis is composed by three independent chapters: two of them are original research papers, and one of them is a review-paper. Their common feature is represented by the “unit of analysis”: namely the economic (growth) impact of population under endogenous choices of human capital investment by agents. The first paper is a survey article that mainly reviews the literatures of international migration and economic growth. The main motivation is to identify how and to what extent migration affects human capital accumulation, and thus, economic growth. The paper reveals that the research on migration requires a multi-dimensional perspective in explaining the human capital related economic questions and shows that that the impact of migration on human capital accumulation can be observed via three channels: The impacts of migration on (i) skill formation, (ii) fertility decisions and (iii) wage (income) levels. This review addresses that the changes in those factors generally drive many of the differences in results (either positive or negative or neutral) across studies. The second paper provides a complementary dimension to the directed technological change literature by introducing the human capital accumulation and migration to an Acemoglu-type growth model. The motivation behind this study is the lack of economic analyses on how skill-biased technological change (SBTC) affects the human capital accumulation in both sending and receiving countries under migration. The main results show that, while a SBTC in a technologically advanced country has positive effects on human capital accumulation in technologically less developed countries via migration, it may adversely affect the incentives of local (natives) low skilled individuals to invest in education at advanced countries. Therefore, the net effect of SBTC is ambiguous (either positive or negative or neutral) in developed countries under migration. The last paper analyzes the impact of population growth on economic growth under endogenous technological change and human capital investment. The novelty of this chapter is the inclusion of a “dilution effect” of population growth on per capita human capital accumulation, which is not present in the original Uzawa-Lucas model. This study has showed that an increase in the population growth rate yields an ambiguous impact on the growth rate of per-capita income due to the relative contribution of two distinct effects of population growth: The direct dilution effect and the indirect ideas effect. This study revealed that the dilution effect has a central role in explaining the ambiguous impact of population growth on economic growth. Another result is that more population growth generates an indirect ideas effect on the rate of innovation and economic growth. These evidences are empirically checked for the advanced countries.