American Economic Review
ISSN 0002-8282 (Print) | ISSN 1944-7981 (Online)
The Human Capital Stock: A Generalized Approach
American Economic Review
vol. 104,
no. 11, November 2014
(pp. 3752–77)
Abstract
This paper reconsiders the traditional approach to human capital measurement in the study of cross-country income differences. Within a broader class of neoclassical human capital aggregators, traditional accounting is found to be a theoretical lower bound on human capital difference across economies. Implementing a generalized accounting empirically illustrates the possibility that capital variation may now account (even fully) for the large income variation between rich and poor countries. These findings reject the constraints on human capital variation that traditional accounting has imposed.Citation
Jones, Benjamin F. 2014. "The Human Capital Stock: A Generalized Approach." American Economic Review, 104 (11): 3752–77. DOI: 10.1257/aer.104.11.3752Additional Materials
JEL Classification
- E24 Employment; Unemployment; Wages; Intergenerational Income Distribution; Aggregate Human Capital; Aggregate Labor Productivity
- J24 Human Capital; Skills; Occupational Choice; Labor Productivity