STEM Graduates, Human Capital Externalities, and Wages in the U.S. Previous research suggests that the local stock of human capital creates positive externalities within local labor markets and plays an important role in regional economic development. However, there is still considerable uncertainty over what types of human capital are most important. Both national and local policymakers in the...

De Long and Summers (1991) began a literature examining the impact of equipment investment on growth. In this paper we examine such a relationship for developing countries by considering imports of equipment from advanced countries as our measure of equipment investment for a sample of 55 developing countries. We examine whether the level of human capital in a country affects its ability to ben...

The Impact of Demographic Change on Human Capital Accumulation This paper investigates whether and to what extent demographic change has an impact on human capital accumulation. The effect of the relative cohort size on educational attainment of young adults in Germany is analyzed utilizing data from the German Socio-Economic Panel for West-German individuals of the birth cohorts 1966 to 1986. ...

Head Start is a comprehensive, early childhood development program designed to augment the human capital and health capital levels of disadvantaged children. Grossman’s (1972) health capital model suggests that early investments of this type should have lasting effects on health outcomes. This research evaluates the impact of Head Start on long-term health by comparing health outcome and behavi...

A model of the cultural co-evolution of honesty and capital is analyzed. It is shown that the sign of the payoff differential between honest and dishonest types depends on the ratio of benefits that an employee gets from shirking to the resulting loss of revenue to the firm. If this ratio decreases with capital accumulation, then multiple equilibria in output and honesty are possible in the lon...

Why More West than East German Firms Export Using unique new data and a recently introduced non-linear decomposition technique this paper shows that the huge difference in the propensity to export between West and East German plants is to a large part due to differences in firm size and human capital intensity. JEL Classification: F14

A simple model of discretionary worker investment in human capital is developed in which worker productivity is affected by a firm-specific match and employers bid strategically for workers. The labor market returns a share of specific capital productivity to workers without Nash bargaining power and without recourse to long-term contracts, because efficient turnover transforms a worker’s forme...

This paper incorporates egocentric comparisons into a human capital accumulation model and studies the evolution of positive self image over time. The paper shows that the process of human capital accumulation together with egocentric comparisons imply that positive self image of a cohort is first increasing and then decreasing over time. Additionally, the paper finds that positive self image: ...

The Economic Determinants of Ethnic Assimilation Expanding on the concept of ethnic human capital, the paper distinguishes between cultural assimilation compatible with persistent ethnic groups and assimilation through intermarriage and other mechanisms that blur distinctions and lead to the disappearance of ethnic identities. Economic determinants of “successful” and “disadvantaged” group outc...