Talent, labor quality, and economic development

German Cubas (), B Ravikumar and Gustavo Ventura

No 2013-027, Working Papers from Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis

Abstract: We develop a theory of labor quality based on (i) the division of the labor force> between unskilled and skilled workers and (ii) investments in skilled workers. In our> theory, countries differ in two key dimensions: talent and total factor productivity> (TFP). We measure talent using the observed achievement levels from the Programme> for International Student Assessment (PISA) scores. Our findings imply that the qual-> ity of labor in rich countries is about twice as large as the quality in poor countries.> Thus, the implied disparities in TFP levels are smaller relative to the standard growth> model using a measure of labor quality based on Mincer returns. In our model, the> resulting elasticity of output per worker with respect to TFP is about 2.

Keywords: Economic development; Education - Economic aspects; Labor productivity (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2013
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-dge, nep-eff, nep-hrm, nep-lab, nep-lam, nep-lma, nep-ltv, nep-neu and nep-ure
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (7)

Downloads: (external link)
https://s3.amazonaws.com/real.stlouisfed.org/wp/2013/2013-027.pdf Full text (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Talent, Labor Quality, and Economic Development (2016)
Working Paper: Talent, Labor Quality and Economic Development (2012)
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:fip:fedlwp:2013-027

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from

DOI: 10.20955/wp.2013.027

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Scott St. Louis ().