Specifying human capital

Ludger Wößmann
Authors registered in the RePEc Author Service: Ludger Woessmann

Munich Reprints in Economics from University of Munich, Department of Economics

Abstract: A review of the measures of the stock of human capital used in empiricalgrowth research - including adult literacy rates, school enrollmentratios, and average years of schooling of the working-age population -reveals that human capital is mostly poorly proxied. The simple use ofthe most common proxy, average years of schooling, misspecifies therelationship between education and the stock of human capital. Based onhuman capital theory, the specification of human capital is extended toallow for decreasing returns to education and for differences in thequality of a year of education. The different specifications give riseto hugely differing measures of the stock of human capital acrosscountries, and development-accounting results show that misspecifiedhuman capital measures can lead to severe underestimation of thedevelopment effect of human capital.

Date: 2003
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (43)

Published in Journal of Economic Surveys 3 17(2003): pp. 239-270

There are no downloads for this item, see the EconPapers FAQ for hints about obtaining it.

Related works:
Journal Article: Specifying Human Capital (2003)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:lmu:muenar:19660

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Munich Reprints in Economics from University of Munich, Department of Economics Ludwigstr. 28, 80539 Munich, Germany. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Tamilla Benkelberg ().