Conventional wisdom suggests that the stocks of human capital were one of the few positive legacies from communism. However, if factories under communism were so inefficient, why would the education system not have been? Using the education production function approach and new data on...

We examine the contribution of human capital to economy-wide technological improvements through the two channels of innovation and imitation. We develop a theoretical model showing that skilled labour has a higher growth-enhancing effect closer to the technological frontier under the reasonable...

This Paper examines the education literature through the lens of sorting. It argues that how individuals sort across neighborhoods, schools and households (spouses), can have important consequences for the acquisition of human capital and inequality. It discusses the implications of different...

This Paper examines the interactions between household matching, inequality, and per capita income. We develop a model in which agents decide whether to become skilled or unskilled, form households, consume and have children. We show that the equilibrium sorting of spouses by skill type (their...

Transition economies have an initial condition of high human capital relative to GDP per capita, giving them high growth potential. In the model, at a good equilibrium a large number of children of well-educated parents take advantage of their family backgrounds and invest substantially in their...

This paper surveys the empirical literature on the growth effects of education and social capital. The main focus is on the cross-country evidence for the OECD countries, but the paper also briefly reviews evidence from labour economics, to clarify where empirical work on education using macro...

This Paper presents a new set of data on human capital. It is constructed so as to stay as close as possible to the censuses compiled by national, OECD or UNESCO sources. We then use these data to test a model that embeds the Mincerian approach to human capital into the Mankiw, Romer and Weil...

Two of the earliest inventions of a human capital-intensive technology were for the production of personal internal goods that enabled humans to derive more pleasure out of leisure, namely dance and music. I model the incentives to invent hobbies and to acquire hobby skills, and its implications...

We examine the relationship between education and mortality in a young population of Italian males. In 1981 several cohorts of young men from specific southern towns were unexpectedly exempted from compulsory military service after a major quake hit the region. Comparisons of exempt cohorts from...