R&D, Imperfect Competition and Growth with Human Capital Accumulation

This paper studies the long-run consequences of imperfect competition on growth and the sectoral distribution of skills within an R&D-based growth model with human capital accumulation. We find that steady-state growth is driven only by incentives to accumulate skills. In the model imperfect competition has a positive growth effect, while influencing the allocation of human capital to the different economic activities employing this factor input. Contrary to general wisdom, the share of resources invested in R&D turns out not to be monotonically increasing in the product market power and its correlation with the equilibrium output growth rate is not unambiguous.