Acemoglu Autor Chapter 1

One of the most important ideas in labor economics is to think of the set of
marketable skills of workers as a form of capital in which workers make a variety of

investments. This perspective is important in understanding both investment
incentives, and the structure of wages and earnings.
Loosely speaking, human capital corresponds to any stock of knowledge or char-
acteristics the worker has (either innate or acquired) that contributes to his or her
“productivity”. This definition is broad, and this has both advantages and disad-
vantages. The advantages are clear: it enables us to think of not only the years of
schooling, but also of a variety of other characteristics as part of human capital
investments. These include school quality, training, attitudes towards work, etc. Us-
ing this type of reasoning, we can make some progress towards understanding some
of the differences in earnings across workers that are not accounted by schooling
differences alone.
The disadvantages are also related. At some level, we can push this notion of human
capital too far, and think of every difference in remuneration that we observe in the
labor market as due to human capital. For example, if I am paid less than another
Ph.D., that must be because I have lower “skills” in some other dimension that’s not
being measured by my years of schooling–this is the famous (or infamous) unobserved
heterogeneity issue.
"Pay differences are based on skills, but not always. There are some
exceptions also"-Discuss
The presumption that all pay differences are related to skills (even if these skills are
unobserved to the economists in the standard data sets) is not a bad place to start
when we want to impose a conceptual structure on
empirical wage distributions, but there are many notable exceptions, some of
which will be discussed later. Here it is useful to mention three:
(1) Compensating differentials: a worker may be paid less in money, because
he is receiving part of his compensation in terms of other (hard-to-
observe) characteristics of the job, which may include lower effort
requirements, more pleasant working conditions, better amenities etc.
(2) Labor market imperfections: two workers with the same human capital
may be paid different wages because jobs differ in terms of their
productivity and pay, and one of them ended up matching with the high
productivity job, while the other has matched with the low productivity
one.
(3) Taste-based discrimination: employers may pay a lower wage to a worker
because of the worker’s gender or race due to their prejudices.
In interpreting wage differences, and therefore in thinking of human capital in-
vestments and the incentives for investment, it is important to strike the right bal-
ance between assigning earning differences to unobserved heterogeneity,
compensating wage differentials and labor market imperfections.
Explain Uses of Human Capital
The standard approach in labor economics views human capital as a set of

skills/characteristics that increase a worker’s productivity. This is a useful start-
ing place, and for most practical purposes quite sufficient. Nevertheless, it may be
useful to distinguish between some complementary/alternative ways of thinking of
human capital. Here is a possible classification:
(1) The Becker view: human capital is directly useful in the production
process. More explicitly, human capital increases a worker’s productivity
in all tasks, though possibly differentially in different tasks, organizations,
and situations. In this view, although the role of human capital in the
production process may be quite complex, there is a sense in which we
can think of it as represented (representable) by a unidimensional object,
4
such as the stock
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of knowledge or skills, h, and this stock is directly part of the production
function.
(2) The Gardener view: according to this view, we should not think of human
capital as unidimensional, since there are many many dimensions or types
of skills. A simple version of this approach would emphasize mental vs.
physical abilities as different skills. Let us dub this the Gardener view af-
ter the work by the social psychologist Howard Gardener, who contributed
to the development of multiple-intelligences theory, in particular
emphasiz- ing how many geniuses/famous personalities were very
“unskilled” in some other dimensions.
(3) The Schultz/Nelson-Phelps view: human capital is viewed mostly as the
capacity to adapt. According to this approach, human capital is especially
useful in dealing with “disequilibrium” situations, or more generally, with
situations in which there is a changing environment, and workers have to
adapt to this.
(4) The Bowles-Gintis view: “human capital” is the capacity to work in or-
ganizations, obey orders, in short, adapt to life in a hierarchical/capitalist
society. According to this view, the main role of schools is to instill in
individuals the “correct” ideology and approach towards life.
(5) The Spence view: observable measures of human capital are more a
signal of ability than characteristics independently useful in the
production process.
Despite their differences, the first three views are quite similar, in that “human
capital” will be valued in the market because it increases firms’ profits. This is
straightforward in the Becker and Schultz views, but also similar in the Gardener
view. In fact, in many applications, labor economists’ view of human capital would
be a mixture of these three approaches. Even the Bowles-Gintis view has very
similar implications. Here, firms would pay higher wages to educated workers
because these workers will be more useful to the firm as they will obey orders
better and will be more reliable members of the firm’s hierarchy. The Spence
view is different from
the others, however, in that observable measures of human capital may be
rewarded because they are signals about some other characteristics of workers.
We will discuss different implications of these views below.
1. Examine the Sources of Human Capital Differences
It is useful to think of the possible sources of human capital differences before

discussing the incentives to invest in human capital:
(1) Innate ability: workers can have different amounts of skills/human capital
because of innate differences. Research in biology/social biology has
docu- mented that there is some component of IQ which is genetic in
origin (there is a heated debate about the exact importance of this
component, and some economists have also taken part in this). The
relevance of this observation for labor economics is twofold: (i) there is
likely to be heterogeneity in human capital even when individuals have
access to the same investment opportunities and the same economic
constraints; (ii) in empirical applications, we have to find a way of
dealing with this source of differences in human capital, especially when
it’s likely to be correlated with other variables of interest.
(2) Schooling: this has been the focus of much research, since it is the most
easily observable component of human capital investments. It has to be
borne in mind, however, that the R2 of earnings regressions that control
for schooling is relatively small, suggesting that schooling differences
account for a relatively small fraction of the differences in earnings.
Therefore, there is much more to human capital than schooling.
Nevertheless, the analysis of schooling is likely to be very informative if we
presume that the same forces that affect schooling investments are also
likely to affect non-schooling investments. So we can infer from the
patterns of schooling investments what may be happening to non-
schooling investments, which are more difficult to observe.
(3) School quality and non-schooling investments: a pair of identical twins
who grew up in the same environment until the age of 6, and then
completed the same years of schooling may nevertheless have different
amounts of human capital. This could be because they attended different
schools with varying qualities, but it could also be the case even if they
went to the same school. In this latter case, for one reason or another,
they may have chosen to make different investments in other components
of their human capital (one may have worked harder, or studied especially
for some subjects, or because of a variety of choices/circumstances, one
may have become more assertive, better at communicating, etc.). Many
economists believe that these “unobserved” skills are very important in
understanding the structure of wages (and the changes in the structure of
wages). The problem is that we do not have good data on these
components of human capital. Nevertheless, we will see different ways of
inferring what’s happening to these dimensions of human capital below.
(4) Training: this is the component of human capital that workers acquire
after schooling, often associated with some set of skills useful for a
particular industry, or useful with a particular set of technologies. At
some level, training is very similar to schooling in that the worker, at least
to some degree, controls how much to invest. But it is also much more
complex, since it is difficult for a worker to make training investments by
himself. The firm also needs to invest in the training of the workers, and
often ends up bearing a large fraction of the costs of these training
investments. The role of the firm is even greater once we take into account
that training has a significant “matching” component in the sense that it
is most useful for the worker to invest in a set of specific technologies that
the firm will be using in the future. So training is often a joint investment
by firms and workers, complicating the analysis.
LECTURES iN LABOR EcONOMICS
(5) Pre-labor market influences: there is increasing recognition among

economists that peer group effects to which individuals are exposed
before they join the labor market may also affect their human capital
significantly. At some level, the analysis of these pre-labor market
influences may be “so- ciological”. But it also has an element of
investment. For example, an altruistic parent deciding where to live is also
deciding whether her off- spring will be exposed to good or less good pre-
labor market influences. Therefore, some of the same issues that arise in
thinking about the theory of schooling and training will apply in this
context too.
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One of the most important ideas in labor economics is to think of the set of

marketable skills of workers as a form of capital in which workers make a variety of

Explain Uses of Human Capital

The standard approach in labor economics views human capital as a set of

1. Examine the Sources of Human Capital Diﬀerences

It is useful to think of the possible sources of human capital diﬀerences before

(5) Pre-labor market influences: there is increasing recognition among

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