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We examine the implications of local externalities in human capital investment for the size of composition of the productive labor force. The model links residential choice, skills acquisition, and production in a city composed of several communities.
Using cross-country estimates of physical and human capital stocks, we run the growth accounting regressions implied by a Cobb-Douglas aggregate production function. Our results indicate that human capital enters insignificantly in explaining per capita growth rates. We next specify an alternative model in which the growth rate of total factor productivity depends on a nation's human capital stock level. Tests of this specification do indicate a positive role for human capital.
Demand for less skilled workers decreased dramatically in the US and in other developed countries over the past two decades. We argue that pervasive skill biased technological change rather than increased trade with the developing world is the principal culprit. The pervasiveness of this technological change is important for two reasons. First, it is an immediate and testable implication of technological change. Second, under standard assumptions, the more pervasive the skill biased technological change the greater the increase in the embodied supply of less skilled workers and the greater the depressing effect on their relative wages through world goods prices. In contrast, in the Heckscher-Ohlin model with small open economies, the skill-bias of the local technological changes do not affect wages. Thus, pervasiveness deals with a major criticism of skill-biased technological as a cause. Testing the implications of pervasive, skill biased technological change we find strong supporting evidence. First, across OECD, most industries have increased the proportion of skilled workers employed despite rising or stable relative wages. Second, increases in demand for skills were concentrated in the same manufacturing industries in different developed countries.
Time inconsistency of tax policy is shown to arise in a setting where households differ in their ability to accumulate wealth and where the government has redistributional objectives. It is assumed that wealth accumulation takes the form of human capital acquired through education. The government is precluded from redistributing to a first-best optimum by a self-selection constraint. The second-best is shown to be time-inconsistent. In the time-consistent optimum, households underinvest in education. An argument can be made for public intervention in the provision of education.
Standard models of public education provision predict an implicit transfer of resources from higher income individuals toward lower income individuals. Many studies have documented that public higher education involves a transfer in the reverse direction. We show that this pattern of redistribution is an equilibrium outcome in a model in which education is only partially publicly provided and individuals vote over the extent to which it is subsidized. We show that increased inequality in the income distribution makes this outcome more likely and that the efficiency implications of this exclusion depend on the wealth of the economy.
The paper analysis within the context of a multicommunity model the effects of several policies that affect the financing of public education. The key features of the model are: (i) individuals differ with respect to income, (ii) individuals choose in which community to reside, (iii) communities are characterized by a proportional tax on income and a quality of public education, and (iv) a communitie`s tax rate is chosen by majority vote.
In this paper, we present an overlapping generations model with heterogeneous agents in which human capital investment through formal schooling is the engine of growth. We use simple functional forms for preferences, technologies, and income distribution to highlight the distinction between economies with public education and those with private education. We find that income inequality declines more quickly under public education. On the other hand, private education yields greater per capita incomes unless the initial income inequality is sufficiently high. We also find that societies will choose public education if a majority of agents have incomes below average.
This article reviews the evidence on cross-national comparisons of earnings and income inequality in OECD countries. It begins with a series of stylized facts which are then examined and supported by recent studies in the field. Economic, demographic, institutional and policy-related influences on earnings and income distribution are reviewed. The paper concludes with a call for more work on empirically testable structural models of household income distribution.
Missing from recent discussions of tax reform is any systematic analysis of the effects of various tax proposals on skill formation. This gap in the literature in empirical public finance is due to the absence of any empirically based general equilibrium models with both human capital formation and physical capital formation that are consistent with observations on modern labor markets. This paper is a progress report on our ongoing research on formulating and estimating dynamic general equilibrium models with endogenous heterogeneous human capital accumulation. Our model explains many features of rising wage inequality in the U.S. economy (James Heckman, Lance Lochner and Christopher Taber, 1998). In this paper, we use our model to study the impacts on skill formation of proposals to switch from progressive taxes to flat income and consumption taxes. For the sake of brevity, we focus on steady states in this paper, although we study both transitions and steady states in our research.
Between 1971 and 1996 opponents of local funding for public schools successfully challenged the constitutionality of school-finance systems in 16 states. Using the variation across states in the timing of these cases we investigate the impact of reform on the distribution of school resources. Our results suggest that court-ordered finance reform reduced within-state inequality in spending by 19 to 34 percent. Successful litigation reduced inequality by raising spending in the poorest districts while leaving spending in the richest districts unchanged thereby increasing aggregate spending on education. Reform led states to fund additional spending through higher state taxes.
This study examines the effects of educational variables on income distribution using cross-section data covering 59 countries. The empirical results show that a higher level of educational attainment of the labor force has an equalizing effect on income distribution, while the larger the dispersion of educational attainment among the labor force, the greater the income inequality. It is also found that the dispersion of schooling among the labor force has a much greater disequalizing effect on income equality than previous studies have suggested.
The paper provides a comprehensive update of the profitability of investment in education at a global scale. The rate of return patterns established in earlier reviews are upheld: namely, that primary education continues to be the number one investment priority in developing countries; the returns decline by the level of schooling and the country's per capita income; investment in women's education is in general more profitable than that for men; returns in the private competitive sector of the economy are higher than among those working in the public sector; and that the public financing of higher education is regressive. The above findings are discussed in the context of controversies in the field, concluding that investment in education continues to be a very attractive investment opportunity in the world today—both from the private and the social point of view.
Fairly recent data for about one hundred countries indicate that as the average level of schooling increases, educational inequality first increases and, after reaching a peak, starts declining in later phases of educational expansion. The turning point occurs when average schooling is about seven years. The observed empirical generalization, which seems quite robust, appears to have important implications for educational and distributional policies and for research on the linkage between education and income inequality.
This note presents a model of endogenous growth where redistribution, determined by a political equilibrium, is in the form of public education. It is shown that there need not be a negative relationship between growth and redistribution as public education increases the level of human capital in the conomy and, at the same time, tends to produce a more even income distribution.
The variance in the logarithms of per capita GDP in purchasing power-parity prices increased in the world from 1960 to 1968 and decreased since the mid 1970s, In the later period the convergence in intercountry incomes more than offset any increase in within country inequality. Approximately two-thirds of this measure of world inequality is intercountry, three-tenths interhousehold within country inequality, and one-twentieth between gender differences in education. If China is excluded from the world sample, the decline in world inequality after 1975 is not evident. Measuring confidently trends in household and gender inequality will require much improved data.
This study finds a significant negative effect of proportional income taxation on human capital. Of the few earlier studies to address this issue, most suggested a negligible effect of taxation on investment on human capital. This earlier conclusion is shown to be incorrect by using a model that is more general in sever al respects than the models used previously.
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