Empirical economic research typically uses education as a proxy for human capital. However, research aimed at validating the inclusion of education measures in growth regressions has yet to reach a consensus, often finding that the sign and significance of education depends on the sample of...

This paper presents a model inspired by the Unified Growth Theory, where reductions in adult mortality together with improvements in technological progress are the deep causes of the transition from a Traditional (Malthusian) Regime to a Pre-Modern Regime, characterized by the accumulation of...

In this paper we analyze the relationship between (adult) mortality and the long-run development of countries from an empirical and theoretical perspective. A quantitative exploration of the model shows that improvements in adult survival rates alone bring an economy towards a Malthusian regime...

Since the mid-1980s, growth theorists have increasingly focused on human capital as a source of long-run economic growth. Recently, however, a number of studies have documented that the social returns of human-capital investment are fairly small, implying that the contribution of human capital...

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...

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...