scispace - formally typeset
Open AccessPosted Content

Intelligence, Human Capital, and Economic Growth: A Bayesian Averaging of Classical Estimates (BACE) Approach

TLDR
This paper showed that a 1 point increase in a nation's average IQ is associated with a persistent 0.11% annual increase in GDP per capita, even when OECD countries are excluded from the sample.
Abstract
Human capital plays an important role in the theory of economic growth, but it has been difficult to measure this abstract concept. We survey the psychological literature on cross-cultural IQ tests, and conclude that modern intelligence tests are well-suited for measuring an important form of a nation’s human capital. Using a new database compiled by Lynn and Vanhanen (2002) along with a Bayesian methodology derived from Sala-i-Martin, Doppelhofer, and Miller (AER, 2004), we show that national average IQ has a robust positive relationship with economic growth. In growth regressions that include only robust control variables, IQ is statistically significant in 99.8% of these 1330 regressions, and the IQ coefficient is always positive. A strong relationship persists even when OECD countries are excluded from the sample. A 1 point increase in a nation’s average IQ is associated with a persistent 0.11% annual increase in GDP per capita.

read more

Citations
More filters
Journal ArticleDOI

Human cognitive abilities: A survey of factor analytic studies

TL;DR: A survey of factor analytic studies of human cognitive abilities can be found in this paper, with a focus on the role of factor analysis in human cognitive ability evaluation and cognition. But this survey is limited.
Journal ArticleDOI

Are smarter groups more cooperative? Evidence from prisoner's dilemma experiments, 1959–2003

TL;DR: A meta-study of repeated prisoner's dilemma experiments run at numerous universities suggests that students cooperate 5-8% more often for every 100-point increase in the school's average SAT score.
Journal ArticleDOI

Precocious Albion: A New Interpretation of the British Industrial Revolution

TL;DR: This article found that in terms of both physical quality and mechanical skills, British workers around 1750 were at a much higher level than their continental counterparts, and the gap in labor quality is consistent with the higher wages paid in eighteenth-century Britain.
Journal ArticleDOI

Why has China Grown So Fast? The Role of Physical and Human Capital Formation*

TL;DR: In this article, the authors address the problem of model uncertainty by adopting two approaches to model selection to consider a wide range of candidate predictors of growth, and examine the growth impact of physical and human capital using panel data techniques.
References
More filters
Journal ArticleDOI

Estimating the Dimension of a Model

TL;DR: In this paper, the problem of selecting one of a number of models of different dimensions is treated by finding its Bayes solution, and evaluating the leading terms of its asymptotic expansion.

Estimating the dimension of a model

TL;DR: In this paper, the problem of selecting one of a number of models of different dimensions is treated by finding its Bayes solution, and evaluating the leading terms of its asymptotic expansion.
Journal ArticleDOI

A Contribution to the Empirics of Economic Growth

TL;DR: The authors examined whether the Solow growth model is consistent with the international variation in the standard of living, and they showed that an augmented Solow model that includes accumulation of human as well as physical capital provides an excellent description of the cross-country data.
Posted Content

A sensitivity analysis of cross-country growth regressions

TL;DR: In this article, the authors study whether the conclusions from existing studies are robust or fragile when small changes in the list of independent variables occur, and they find that although "policy"appears to be importantly related to growth, there is no strong independent relationship between growth and almost every existing policy indicator.
Posted Content

I Just Ran Two Million Regressions

TL;DR: In this article, instead of analyzing the extreme bounds of the estimates of the coefficient of a particular variable, the authors analyze the entire distribution and find that a substantial number of variables can be found to be strongly related to growth.
Related Papers (5)