This paper develops a new latent index of human capital identified as valuable skills for seventy countries for the period 1970-2003. The index is compared to existing measures of human capital in assessing the Benhabib and Spiegel (2005) model of logistic technology diffusion. The study undertakes extensive sensitivity analysis and accounts for alternative production functions, capital-skill c...

In psychology, many of theories of skill acquisition have had great success in addressing the fine details of learning relatively simple tasks, but can they scale up to complex tasks that are more typical of human learning in the real world? In this paper we describe production composition, a theory of skill acquisition that combines aspects of the theories forwarded by Anderson (1982) and Newe...

Although there is no consensus regarding the functions of sleep, one exciting hypothesis is that sleep contributes importantly to learning and memory. Over the last decade, several studies have provided substantive evidence supporting the role of sleep in memory processing. This article focuses on sleep-dependent learning and brain plasticity in humans, specifically in the development of skill ...

I provide an economic model with endogenous movements in TFP as a tool for understanding a rationale behind the productivity decline in New Zealand. Cohort quality, measured by a country's human capital distribution determines opportunities for growth. Vintages of human skills are subject to network effects. These network effects, while important for productivity, have the side effect of introd...

This paper presents a skill learning model CLARION. Different from existing models of mostly high-level skill learning that use a top-down approach (that is, turning declarative knowledge into procedural knowledge through practice), we adopt a bottom-up approach toward low-level skill learning, where procedural knowledge develops first and declarative knowledge develops later. Our model is form...

The dynamics of inequality are studied in a model of human capital accumulation with credit constraints. This model admits a multiplicity of steady state skill ratios that exhibit varying degrees of inequality across households. The main result studies equilibrium paths. It is shown that an equilibrium sequence of skill ratios must converge monotonically to the smallest steady state that exceed...

Human Adaptive Mechatronics(HAM) is a new concept which was proposed in our university's research project sponsored by Japanese Ministry of Education, Sports, Culture, Science and Technology(MEXT), and is defined as ``intelligent mechanical systems that adapt themselves to the user's skill under various environments, assist to improve the user's skill, and assist the human-machine system to ach...

objectives: a large number of congenitally deaf children are born annually. if not treated, this will have destructive effects on their language and speech development, educational achievements and future occupation. in this study it has been tried to determine the level of language skills in children with cochlear implants (ci) in comparison with normal hearing (nh) age-mates. methods: test of...