On endogenous growth with productivity shocks

Abstract

Recent evidence on output convergence across economies has been widely interpreted as falsifying the predictions of endogenous growth theory. This paper shows, however, that nonconvergence is an artifact of the deterministic structure of endogenous growth models: when stochastic factor productivity is introduced, convergence tends to occur despite nondiminishing returns to capital and persistent growth. For the case of constant returns to capital, it is shown that output paths of different economies converge with probability one in single-sector economies. For multi-sectora economies convergence occurs for most plausible specifications of the stochastic process driving productivity. Increasing returns reduce the probability of convergence.