Unemployment and Increasing Returns to Human Capital

Gilles Saint-Paul

No 921, CEPR Discussion Papers from Centre for Economic Policy Research

Abstract: This paper studies a model of human capital accumulation with real wage rigidity. It is shown that the arbitrage condition between hiring a skilled versus an unskilled worker may be stated as a positive relationship between their relative unemployment rates. It may be the case that this locus is steep enough to generate increasing returns to education. This may lead to multiple equilibria: a high-education equilibrium may coexist with a low-education equilibrium. In the former, the unskilled are more exposed to unemployment relative to the skilled, as compared with the latter. The two equilibria cannot be Pareto-ranked, but the latter is preferred to the former by workers, while `savers' prefer the high-education equilibrium.

Keywords: Education; Multiple Equilbria; Unemployment; Wage Rigidity (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: E24 I2 J24 J31 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 1994-02
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.cepr.org/active/publications/discussion_papers/dp.php?dpno=921 (application/pdf)

Related works:
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:cpr:ceprdp:921

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.cepr.org/ ... pers/dp.php?dpno=921

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in CEPR Discussion Papers from Centre for Economic Policy Research 33 Great Sutton Street, London EC1V 0DX, UK.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by CEPR ().