Economics question

[ShaneWalter]

What does the Alpha symbol mean in an economics context? I'm trying to understand the equations used in the Romer model (I'll post them in an attachment in a minute if they'll help with context).

I have a midterm in my Economic Development class Tuesday, and the prof no-showed on the Thursday class (the last class before the midterm) so there's some stuff that we haven't gone over in lectures that will be on the midterm. The Romer model is one of the things.

I'm guessing Alpha symbol is used for something pretty common because it doesn't really define the variable in the textbook at all, or at least nowhere I could find.

[ShaneWalter]

Okay, so there's the equations. The first one, I think, the subscripts i denotes that the equation is for an individual firm?

The second one is an aggregate production fuction.

To go from the second equation to third, we assume that A(technological progress) is a constant, and then basically take the derivative of the function to get the output growth rate per capita.

The variables are:

Beta = Capital Externalities, Y = income, A = technology, L = Labour, n = Population growth rate, K = capital, and g = output growth rate.

Anyway, any help would be appreciated.

I could scan the page that of the textbook that describes the Romer model if that'd be useful, but I kinda doubt anyone wants to read through a page of a textbook, and it doesn't define the variable Alpha anyway.

[Lul Thyme]

A few minutes' search on wiki yielded the following :

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romer_Model

->

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solow_model

->

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cobb-Douglas

->
α and β are the output elasticities of labor and capital, respectively. These values are constants determined by available technology.