Journal ArticleDOI
Education in Production
TLDR
In this article, the authors consider the question: Why has the incentive been maintained for a relative expansion in the supply of skilled labor in the United States? Three alternative explanations are considered, and one is pursued with an empirical analysis of factors determining relative wages among skill classes in agriculture.Abstract:
There have been several studies of the demand for education as an investment good1 which generally take input and product prices as given and concentrate on computing (internal) rates of return to investment in schooling. Although these estimates usually indicate returns that are high by most standards, there is considerable variation, both through time and space, which points to the need for a clearer understanding of the underlying factors affecting profitability of investment in people. For such an analysis, education must be viewed not only as an investment but also as a factor of production. In this paper, I consider the question: Why has the incentive been maintained for a relative expansion in the supply of skilled labor in the United States? Three alternative explanations are considered, and one is pursued with an empirical analysis of factors determining relative wages among skill classes in agriculture. As we would expect for any factor of production, the evidence suggests that the return to education is affected by factor ratios, but ratios do not tell the whole story. In agriculture, much of the "leverage" distinguishing college graduates from less schooled persons has its roots in technical change as reflected in the level of research activity. Thus the incentive for acquiring a college education is based on dynamical considerations of changing technology; and if technology becomes stagnant, this incentive is reduced and may disappear. Convincing evidence of the maintained incentive for acquiring schooling is found in Gary Becker's (1964) estimates of private rates of return which are reproduced in table 1. When these rates of return are compared to theread more
Citations
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Adoption of agricultural innovation in developing countries : a survey (revised)
TL;DR: This article reviewed various studies which have provided a description of and possible explanation to patterns of innovation adoption in the agricultural sector and highlighted the diversity in observed patterns among various farmers' classes as well as differences in results from different studies in different socioeconomic environments.
Posted Content
The Economics of Schooling: Production and Efficiency in Public Schools.
TL;DR: In this article, the authors point out that public and professional interest in education is likely to be short-lived, doomed to dissipate as frustration over the inability of policy to improve school practice sets in.
Journal ArticleDOI
Adoption of agricultural innovations in developing countries: a survey
TL;DR: In this article, the authors review various studies which have provided a description and possible explanation to patterns of innovation adoption in the agricultural sector, and point out that the tendency of many studies to consider adoption in dichotomous terms (adoption/nonadoption) may not be appropriate in many cases where the actual decisions are defined over a more continuous range.
Posted Content
Returns to Investment in Education: A Further Update
TL;DR: In the 40-plus year history of estimates of returns to investment in education, there have been several reviews of the empirical results in attempts to establish patterns as discussed by the authors, and many more estimates from a wide variety of countries, including over time evidence, and estimates based on new econometric techniques, reaffirm the importance of human capital theory.
Posted Content
Technical Change, Inequality, and the Labor Market
TL;DR: The authors argue that the behavior of wages and returns to schooling indicates that technical change has been skill-biased during the past sixty years and that the recent increase in inequality is most likely due to an acceleration in skill bias.
References
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Book
Equality of Educational Opportunity
TL;DR: In this article, the authors discuss the importance of equity and excellence in education in the context of the 1968 Equalization of EdUCATIONAL OPPORTUNITY (EOW) campaign.
Book ChapterDOI
Investment in humans, technological diffusion and economic growth
TL;DR: Most economic theorists have embraced the principle that education enhances one's ability to receive, decode, and understand information, and that information processing and interpretation is important for performing or learning to perform many jobs as discussed by the authors.
Book
Transforming traditional agriculture
TL;DR: The debate on the transformation of traditional agriculture, which appeared in the pages of EPW more than eleven years ago, did not extend to tracing the Schultzian errors to their source as discussed by the authors.
Journal ArticleDOI
The Production Function and the Theory of Capital
TL;DR: In this article, the authors discuss the production function and the theory of capital in the context of the economic system of the neo-classical system, which is based on the postulate that, in the long run, the rate of real wages tends to be such that all available labor is employed.