The generation of new knowledge in economics: An endogenous growth model

Abstract

This document presents a model to produce new knowledge on the endogenous relationship of teaching and research activities. The theoretical description of the model explains returns to scale as a function of a learning curve, in which the existence of an academic community—in the Lakatos sense—is critical for the generation of new scientific knowledge, as it counteracts the particular case of diminishing returns. The Montecarlo exercise was based on the statistical characteristics of the records of scientific production of the Universidad Católica de Colombia from 2007 to 2010 in economics journals, which allowed establishing two conclusions. First, in the presence of increasing returns, improvements in the learning coefficient and human capital progressively drive the growth rate of new knowledge without modifying the levels of capital and labor combined in initial technology. Second, the growth rate of the learning coefficient due to practice and in human capital continuously increases the production of new knowledge when there is an academic community in relation to a technology with diminishing returns, characteristic of an environment without an academic community.