A review of the measures of the stock of human capital used in empirical growth research reveals that human capital is mostly poorly proxied. The simple use of the most common proxy, average years of schooling of the working-age population, misspecifies the relationship between education and the...

What is it about schooling that the labor market rewards? The long time answer has essentially been noncognitive skills (i.e., behavioral and personality traits). Allowing cognitive skills (i.e., the capacity to process information and apply knowledge to working tasks) to be acquired both inside...