Human capital and the time-profile of human fertility revisited

This paper examines a model of the intertemporal distribution of births recently proposed by Cigno that concludes 1) the optimal time profile will satisfy the Hotelling rule of natural resources depletion, and 2) women with high initial endowments of human capital will have all their children early in married life while those with low initial endowments will spread childbearing more evenly over the fertile period. This paper argues that Cigno's model is inconsistent with the empirical evidence. Specifically, it is claimed that: 1) the natural resource analogy has been misapplied; 2) the stated 1st order conditions are incorrect; 3) optimal birth profiles do not satsify the Hotelling rule; and 4) the optimal time profile is for all women, regardless of their human capital, to concentrate births at the end of the fertile period. Since the discounted opportunity cost of a birth declines over time, it always pays to postpone a birth as long as possible. However, again, the theoretical prediction of delayed childbirth is not consistent with available evidence, suggesting that important factors have been omitted from this model.     

Human capital accumulation, fertility and economic development

We examine the development paths of an economy by incorporating the trade-off between the quality and quantity of children and the substitutability between the educational effect within the family and the education paid for by the parent. There is a threshold wage rate, above which individuals begin to invest in the human capital of their children, while reducing the number of children. At this point, the economy shifts from an exogenous growth phase to an endogenous growth phase. It is also shown that the aggregate saving rate is positively correlated with the youth dependency ratio in the development process.     

Human capital and fertility in Chinese clans before modern growth

This paper studies the effect of changes in the return to human capital on the fertility–education relationship. The setting is in Anhui Province, China in the thirteenth to twentieth centuries. Over this period, key changes occurred in the civil service examination system, providing a means to test whether incentives for acquiring education influenced fertility decisions. I form an intergenerationally linked dataset from over 43,000 individuals from all social strata to examine the evidence for a child quantity–quality tradeoff. First, as the civil service examination system became more predictable and less discretionary starting in the seventeenth century, raising the return to human capital, I find evidence that households with a lower number of children had a higher chance that one of their sons would participate in the state examinations. This finding is robust to accounting for differences in resources, health, parental human capital, and demographic characteristics. Importantly, the finding is not limited to a small subset of rich households but present in the sample as a whole. Second, the negative relationship between fertility and education disappeared as the lower chance to become an official during the nineteenth century implied a decline in the return to human capital. Taken together, my findings support the hypothesis that fertility choices respond to changes in the return to human capital.     

Growth,fertility and human capital: A survey

This paper surveys recent work on endogenous fertility and endogenous growth. These models provide the building blocks for a theory of development. They are capable of explaining income and fertility differentials between rich and poor countries. They can produce switching behavior, countries that transform themselves from no growth economies into high growth economies. The fertility and growth effects of social security programs are also examined. Finally models with increasing returns to population are presented. They are capable of reproducing very long term relationships between human capital, fertility and economic growth.     

Physical and human capital,fertility, and childcare services

We shed light on a nexus between fertility transitions and economic growth patterns. We construct a two-sector overlapping generations (OLG) model with endogenous fertility, physical capital, and human capital, where one sector produces goods, and another produces childcare services. If the elasticity of fertility for expenditure on childcare services is zero, the economy experiences endogenous growth, and fertility does not depend on physical and human capital, but it increases with parental child-rearing time. On the other hand, if elasticity is positive, the economy converges to a steady state, and the number of children becomes the homogenous function of degree of elasticity (less than one). In other words, fertility is the decreasing-return-to-scale function of physical and human capital. We show that a subsidy policy for education is more desirable than a subsidy for childcare services.     

Immigration, fertility, and human capital: A model of economic decline of the West

I show how the influences of unskilled immigration, differential fertility between immigrants and the local indigenous population, and incentives for investment in human capital combine to predict the decline of the West. In particular, indigenous low-skilled workers lose from unskilled immigration even if the indigenous low-skilled workers do not finance redistribution, do not compete with immigrants in the labor market, and do not compete with immigrants for publicly financed income transfers. For the economy at large, high-fertility unskilled immigrants and a low-fertility indigenous population result in economic decline through reduced human capital accumulation and reduced growth of per-capita output.     

The consumption tax in the presence of altruistic cash and human capital bequests with endogenous fertility decisions

We provide an analysis of the consumption tax policy in the presence of cash bequests, human capital investments in children, and endogenous fertility decisions. It is shown that the consumption tax is no longer neutral if the tax rate is constant over the taxpayer's life cycle, labor supply is exogenous, and the parent expects the offspring to pay the same tax rate, if the number of children is chosen optimally by the parent. Neutrality breaks down because the shadow prices of both bequests and fertility are interlinked; it is more expensive to produce a child the larger either bequest is and it is more expensive to make a bequest of either type to each child the larger the number of children produced. Several examples are provided where imposing the consumption tax induces an increase in the number of children produced and a decrease in net capital formation.     

Human capital and economic development

This paper develops a general equilibrium model of fertility and human capital investment with young adult mortality. Because young adult mortality is negatively related to average young adult human capital, human capital accumulation lowers mortality, inducing demographic transition and industrial revolution. Data confirm that young adult mortality is related negatively to schooling, and the rate of return to schooling, and positively to fertility. The data indicate a negative relationship between TFP growth and schooling accumulation. The model fits the data on country populations, per capita incomes, human capital, total fertility rates, infant mortality, life expectancy and conditional life expectancy.     

Optimal social security in a dynastic model with human capital externalities,fertility and endogenous growth

In this paper we investigate the optimal scale of pay-as-you-go social security in a dynastic family model with human capital externalities, fertility and endogenous growth. Human capital externalities reduce the return to human capital investment and hence lead to under-investment in human capital and over-reproduction of the population. If the taste for the number of children is sufficiently weak relative to the taste for the welfare of children, social security can be welfare enhancing by reducing fertility and raising human capital investment per child.     

Human capital and the private equity premium

When capital market is imperfect, an entrepreneur has to invest substantial personal funds to start a firm and has to bear large firm-specific risk. Furthermore, if a typical entrepreneur is risk averse, private equity should earn a premium for idiosyncratic risk. In this paper I explore the interaction of human capital with the decision to become an entrepreneur. I calibrate a model of entrepreneurial choice to illustrate a significant attenuating effect of human capital on the premium for firm-specific risk. When an entrepreneur can quit the business and work for hire, the firm-specific risk premium is order of magnitude lower than without this option. While an entrepreneur puts at risk a substantial fraction of financial wealth, she does not commit all human capital to the current business. At stake is only the labor income forgone while managing the firm and the rest of human capital is unaffected by the business risk. Empirical evidence suggests that private equity does not earn any significant premium over publicly traded equity. The model with human capital is consistent with this observation, assuming typical entrepreneur forgoes a small expected return (1.5%) in lieu of intangible benefits of entrepreneurship.     

人力资本·社会资本·员工自愿离职

对员工自愿离职的研究多从成本-收益或人力资本的视角来研究,其实,组织的社会资本也影响着员工的自愿离职,员工的自愿离职也影响着组织的社会资本.     

Human capital in the inner city

Twenty-six percent of black males in the USA report seeing someone shot at before turning 12. This paper investigates how black young males alter their behavior when living in violent neighborhoods, using the nationally representative National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1997 to quantitatively characterize the “code of the street” from the sociology literature. Black and white young males are equally likely to engage in violent behavior, conditional on reported exposure to violence. Education and labor market outcomes are worse when reporting exposure, unconditionally and controlling for observables. Mediators documented in the ethnography are quantitatively important in the estimated structural model.     

Human capital theory and social capital theory on sports management

This paper analyzes sports managers' earnings and blends traditional aspects of management derived from human capital theory with new aspects derived from social capital theory. It captures the integrative and relational aspects of sports management. In 2000, the authors carried out a questionnaire in the Madeira Island. Data about the amateur sports managers were then taken from it. Results obtained verify that sports managers' earnings are function of both types of theoretical determinants posited by the human capital theory and the social capital theory. The authors conclude that both issues are determinants of sports managers' earnings.     

Human–capital investment and the wage gap

Summary. According to empirical studies, the wage differential by skills evolved non–monotonically in the past decades although the relative supply of skilled labor steadily increased. The present paper provides a theoretical explanation for this finding. In our setting, technological change intertemporally alters the human–capital investment incentives of heterogeneous individuals. As a consequence of changing incentives, the time path of the relative wage is U–shaped while there is a rise in the share of skilled workers. Received: November 28, 2000; revised version: January 30, 2001     

Risky human capital and deferred capital income taxation

We study the structure of optimal wedges and capital taxes in a dynamic Mirrlees economy with endogenous distribution of skills. Human capital is a private, stochastic state variable that drives the skill process of each individual. Building on the findings of the labor literature, we construct a tractable life-cycle model of human capital evolution with risky investment and stochastic depreciation. In this setting, we demonstrate the optimality of (a) a human capital premium, i.e., an excess return on human capital relative to physical capital, (b) a large intertemporal wedge early in the life-cycle, and (c) a non-zero intratemporal wedge even at the top of the skill distribution at all dates except the last date in the life-cycle. The main implication for the structure of optimal linear capital taxes is the necessity of deferred taxation of physical capital. The average marginal tax rate on physical capital held in every period is zero in present value. However, expected capital tax payments do not equal zero in every period. Necessarily, agents face negative expected capital tax payments early in the life-cycle and positive expected capital tax payments late in the life-cycle.     

Human capital and income distribution dynamics

The paper assumes a continuum of two period-lived agents; agents are identical except for inherited income. Young agents allocate their inheritance between consumption and investment in human capital under uncertainty. In the second period they receive a wage proportional to the accumulated human capital and invest in offspring. Two main results arise: a low earning per unit of human capital leads economy to converge to a stationary income distribution whatever the initial distribution and vice versa, for a sufficiently high wage, endogenous growth operates and the distributive dynamics depends on initial conditions. In this case different redistributive policies are analysed.     

Human capital heterogeneity of the unemployed and jobless recoveries

The jobless recovery enigma remains largely unsolved. As a special case of broader unemployment, the term “jobless recovery” describes an economic recovery where output recovers—and even expands—yet employment growth remains anemic. While the effects of these prolonged recoveries are significant—from increased crime to a lifetime reduction in wages—they are not well understood. Building on the insights of labor market matching models that incorporate heterogeneity among workers, this paper sheds light on jobless recoveries, developing a first-of-its-kind index of human capital heterogeneity for the unemployed, and testing that index using of a Structural Vector Autoregression. I demonstrate that the extent to which unemployed human capital is heterogeneous and specific, rather than homogeneous and general, plays a key and under-appreciated role in the labor market; increases in human capital heterogeneity can account for between one-quarter to three-quarters of the joblessness of the past three recoveries in the pre-COVID era.     

Uncertainty and the specificity of human capital

This paper studies the choice between general and specific human capital. A trade-off arises because general human capital, while less productive, can easily be reallocated across firms. Accordingly, the fraction of individuals with specific human capital depends on the amount of uncertainty in the economy. Our model implies that while economies with more specific human capital tend to be more productive, they also tend to be more vulnerable to turbulence. As such, our theory sheds some light on the experience of Japan, where human capital is notoriously specific: while Japan benefited from this predominately specific labor force in tranquil times, this specificity may also have been at the heart of its prolonged stagnation.     

Human capital investment and debt constraints

When young individuals face binding debt constraints, their human capital investments will be insufficiently financed by private creditors. If generations overlap, then a well-designed fiscal policy may be able to improve human capital investments by replacing missing capital markets with an intergenerational transfer scheme. The optimal (balanced budget) fiscal policy in this context entails the joint provision of an education subsidy for the young and a pension program for the old, financed with a tax on those in their peak earning years. We demonstrate, however, that the desirability of such a cradle-to-grave policy depends crucially on the assumption of an exogenous debt constraint. If debt constraints arise endogenously for reasons of limited commitment, then the optimal (balanced budget) fiscal policy looks radically different. Furthermore, we find that cradle-to-grave type policy interventions may actually lead to lower levels of human capital investment as altered default incentives induce private creditors to contract the supply of student loans by an amount greater than the subsidy. In some cases, the constrained-optimal policy entails zero intervention. These results highlight the importance of taking seriously the reasons for why debt constraints exist.     

试论企业经营者人力资本激励与约束

本文从企业经营者人力资本的一般特征入手,进一步延伸分析了企业经营者人力资本的产权特征,在此基础上论述了企业经营者激励与约束的制度选择,即赋予企业经营者剩余控制权和部分剩余索取权。