Skill Obsolescence, Vintage Effects and Changing Tasks

Experience vs. obsolescence: A vintage-human-capital model

I introduce endogenous human-capital accumulation into an infinitehorizon version of Chari & Hopenhayn’s (1991) vintage-human-capital model. Different skill levels inside a vintage are complementary in production. I establish equivalence between competitive equilibrium and a planner’s problem, which ensures uniqueness of equilibrium. Returns to skill and tenure premia are highest in young vinta...

Syllogistic Reasoning Tasks, Working Memory, and Skill

Offshoring , tasks , and the skill - wage pattern

The paper investigates the relationship between offshoring, wages, and the ease with which individuals’ tasks can be offshored. Our analysis relates to recent theoretical contributions arguing that there is only a loose relationship between the suitability of a task for offshoring and the associated skill level. Accordingly, wage effects of offshoring can be very heterogeneous within skill grou...

Changing lives with empathy, compassion and skill.

She persuaded Vodacom Foundation Chairman, Mthobi Tyamzashe (himself born with a cleft lip), to sit in on one infant’s life-changing operation, in spite of his deep aversion to hospitals. To make doubly sure, Naiker got Vodacom’s then CEO, Alan Knott-Craig (who spent the first 5 years of his life in leg calipers and much later suffered a life-changing near-fatal heart attack), to attend a subse...

Worker Skill Estimation in Team-Based Tasks

Many emerging applications such as collaborative editing, multi-player games, or fan-subbing require to form a team of experts to accomplish a task together. Existing research has investigated how to assign workers to such team-based tasks to ensure the best outcome assuming the skills of individual workers to be known. In this work, we investigate how to estimate individual worker’s skill base...