We combine growth theory with US Census data on individual schooling and wages to estimate the aggregate return to human capital and human capital externalities in cities. Our estimates imply that a one-year increase in average schooling in cities increases their aggregate labor productivity by 8 to 11 percent. We find no evidence for aggregate human capital externalities in cities however. Our...

Human capital, in the form of embodied knowledge or skills, is under threat of automation. To examine the effect of it on a macroeconomy, I develop the Uzawa-Lucas model in which the accumulation of human capital follows the stochastic process. With two equality constraints, the closed-form solution gets obtainable. It shows that increase in uncertainty about the human capital accumulation redu...

This article employs cointegration and error-correction modelling to test the causal relationship between real income, exports and human capital stock using data for China over the period 1960 to 1999. We find that real exports, human capital and real income are cointegrated when real exports is the dependent variable, but are not cointegrated when human capital or real income are the dependent...

In recent years substantial progress has been achieved in the field of ecological economics for clarifying human-nature interrelations. The fundamental role of the lifesupport functions of the environment (Odum, 1975) for economic development and sustainability has entered from ecology into economics, and has started to be theoretically as well as empirically analyzed. This has, in part, given ...

We reevaluate the role of human capital in determining the wealth of nations. We use standard human capital theory to estimate stocks of human capital and allow the quality of human capital to vary across countries. Our model can explain differences in schooling and earnings profiles and, consequently, estimates of Mincerian rates of return across countries. We find that effective human capital...

This paper shows how the degree of credit-market imperfections affects the steady-state distributions of income and wealth, human capital investment, and the pattern of comparative advantage. The impact of trade liberalization on the accumulation of human capital depends on how it affects (1) the incentives to accumulate human capital, (2) the borrowing constraints facing human capital accumula...

BACKGROUND Research on how rising human capital affects the consequences of population ageing rarely considers the fact that the human capital of the elderly population is composed in a specific way that is shaped by their earlier schooling and work experience. For an elderly population of a fixed size and age-sex composition, this entails that the higher its human capital, the greater the tota...

The identification of aggregate human-capital externalities is still not fully understood. The existing (Mincerian) approach confounds positive externalities with wage changes due to a downward sloping demand curve for human capital. As a result, the Mincerian approach yields positive externalities even when wages equal marginal social products. We propose an approach that identifies human-capi...

When productivity is fostered by both the individual’s human capital and by the average level of human capital in the economy, individuals under-invest in human capital. A strictly positive probability of migration to a richer country, by raising both the level of human capital formed by optimizing individuals in the home country and the average level of human capital of non-migrants in the cou...