In this essay, I provide an extensive review of the theoretical and empirical contributions pertaining to human capital. The first part follows the development of the theory with special emphasis, naturally, on Becker's path-breaking work (JPE '62 and Woytinski Lecture) and also on Ben-Porath's...

This paper analyses the path of private consumption and its main macroeconomic determinants. These are related to the life-cycle approach which helps explaining consumption smoothing. In that respect, it is important to go beyond the simple correlation between current disposable income and...