Human Capital Markets

Jishnu Das and Cauê Dobbin

No 35061, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: In many low- and middle-income countries, consumers access education and health services in environments characterized by substantial provider choice. In these settings, a dense landscape of fee-charging private providers has emerged, often located near public facilities and competing for the same clientele. We refer to these environments as human capital markets. This chapter begins by documenting that such markets are now pervasive. We present empirical evidence that human capital markets share many features with conventional product markets: households choose among a wide range of public and private providers with heterogeneous attributes, and providers respond strategically to policy interventions and competitive pressures. We then assess the extent to which canonical models from industrial organization can account for observed behavior, highlighting both their insights and their limitations. Next, we examine the key ways in which human capital markets depart from standard product-market benchmarks—most notably that education and health are both consumption goods and investments, and that quality is often difficult to observe—and review empirical and conceptual approaches developed to address these features. We conclude by outlining the major unresolved questions and promising directions for future research.

JEL-codes: I10 I11 I15 I20 I22 I25 L10 O1 O15 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2026-04
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-mac
Note: DEV ED EH
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.nber.org/papers/w35061.pdf (application/pdf)
Access to the full text is generally limited to series subscribers, however if the top level domain of the client browser is in a developing country or transition economy free access is provided. More information about subscriptions and free access is available at http://www.nber.org/wwphelp.html. Free access is also available to older working papers.

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:nbr:nberwo:35061

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.nber.org/papers/w35061
The price is Paper copy available by mail.

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc National Bureau of Economic Research, 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138, U.S.A.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().