Intergenerational Mobility, Human Capital Composition and Distance to Technological Frontier

An endogenous skilled biased growth model has been considered to show that along the growth path wage gap widened and both upward and downward mobility fall. This implies that education becomes more correlated with initial conditions and less related with the cognitive ability. Growth occurs through the twin channels of technology - imitating from the world technology frontier and innovating on its own technology level - innovation being more skilled-intensive than imitation. An imperfect capital market has been considered where individual's education decision depends on the cognitive ability as well as on the parental income. Moreover, it is shown that growth enhancing education policy leads to absolute convergence of all the economies to the world technology frontier. In the imitation-innovation regime, life time utility gap within skilled as well as unskilled human capital rise due to parental income differences. Furthermore, life time utility gap within skilled human capital rises due to cognitive ability differences.