On the Assignment of Workers to Occupations and the Human Capital of Countries

Alexander Monge-Naranjo, Matias Tapia and Verónica Mies ()

No 1192, 2018 Meeting Papers from Society for Economic Dynamics

Abstract: A worker's human capital determines his absolute and relative productivity across the different occupations. For a country as a whole, the cross-section distribution of workers determines the country's equilibrium assignment of workers to jobs and the resulting aggregate human capital. We consider a tractable general equilibrium Roy model and use it to infer, from observed data across countries and time: (i) the absolute and comparative advantage components of the different workers, (ii) the occupation intensity of a country's human capital, and (iii) the distortions in the allocation of workers to jobs. Contrary to the standard measure that implicitly assumes that human capital entails only absolute advantage, we show that the data implies that: (a) human capital has a strong comparative advantage component; (b) a higher distribution in the human capital distribution of workers lead to skill-upgrading across occupations and to a higher skill intensity of the overall human capital of countries; (c) cross-country differences in aggregate human capital explains a much larger fraction of the cross-country income differences from the standard model. We also find substantial costs from the distortions in the allocation of workers to jobs, especially for the less developed countries. Finally, we use the model to assess whether a country should direct its efforts to enhance the skills at the higher- or lower-end of the skill distribution.

Date: 2018
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-dge
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
https://red-files-public.s3.amazonaws.com/meetpapers/2018/paper_1192.pdf (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:red:sed018:1192

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in 2018 Meeting Papers from Society for Economic Dynamics Society for Economic Dynamics Marina Azzimonti Department of Economics Stonybrook University 10 Nicolls Road Stonybrook NY 11790 USA. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Christian Zimmermann ().