We study an overlapping generations model of human capital accumulation with threshold effects using regional data for West Germany. Our basic goal is to shed light on what makes German regions grow. The paper finds that the relative income distribution appears to be stratifying into a trimodal...

This paper provides a new measure of human capital using PISA and PIAAC surveys, and mean years of schooling. The new measure is a cohort-weighted average of past PISA scores (representing the quality of education) of the working age population and the corresponding mean years of schooling...

This paper calculates new measures of human capital. Contrary to the existing literature, they are based on realistic rates of return to education, which are allowed to vary substantially across countries and to some extent over time. The new measures perform well in regression analysis...

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 labor has a higher growth-enhancing effect closer to the technological frontier under the reasonable...

This paper assesses whether European firms' innovative performance is impacted by investments in training directly aimed at developing and/or introducing innovation, in addition to the scale of a firm's investments in innovation proxied by the number of R&D personnels. In particular, it explores...

The importance of investment in early childhood education (ECE) has been widely documented in the literature. Among the benefits, particularly for children from disadvantaged backgrounds, is its potential to mitigate educational inequality. However, some evidence also suggests that the positive...

We survey a number of papers that have focused on the construction of cross-country data sets on average years of schooling. We discuss the construction of the different series, compare their profiles and construct indicators of their information content. The discussion focuses on a sample of...

We survey a number of papers that have focused on the construction of cross-country data sets on average years of schooling. We discuss the construction of the different series, compare their profiles and construct indicators of their information content. The discussion focuses on a sample of...

We provide robust and compelling evidence of the marked impact of tertiary education on the economic growth of less developed countries and of its the relatively smaller impact on the growth of developed ones. Our results argue in favor of the accumulation of high skill levels especially in...

We construct a revised version of the Barro and Lee (1996) data set for a sample of OECD countries using previously unexploited sources and following a heuristic approach to obtain plausible time profiles for attainment levels by removing sharp breaks in the data that seem to reflect changes in...