scispace - formally typeset
Journal ArticleDOI

How Important Is Human Capital for Development? Evidence from Immigrant Earnings

Lutz Hendricks
- 01 Feb 2002 - 
- Vol. 92, Iss: 1, pp 198-219
TLDR
This paper found that for countries below 40% of the US output per worker, less than half of the output gap relative to the US is attributed to human and physical capital in the US.
Abstract
This paper offers new evidence on the sources of cross-country income differences. It exploits the idea that observing immigrant workers from different countries in the same labor market provides an opportunity to estimate their human-capital endowments. These estimates suggest that human and physical capital account for only a fraction of cross-country income differences. For countries below 40% of the US output per worker, less than half of the output gap relative to the US is attributed to human and physical capital.

read more

Citations
More filters
Journal ArticleDOI

Do Better Schools Lead to More Growth? Cognitive Skills, Economic Outcomes, and Causation

TL;DR: This article developed a new metric for the distribution of educational achievement across countries that can further track the cognitive skill distribution within countries and over time, and found a close relationship between educational achievement and GDP growth that is remarkably stable across extensive sensitivity analyses of specification, time period, and country samples.
Book ChapterDOI

Chapter 9 Accounting for Cross-Country Income Differences

TL;DR: The current consensus is that efficiency is at least as important as capital in explaining income differences as mentioned in this paper, and the basic methods that lead to this consensus are surveyed and explored in this paper.
Journal ArticleDOI

Economics and Emigration: Trillion-Dollar Bills on the Sidewalk?

TL;DR: For example, the authors estimates that the gains to eliminating migration barriers amount to large fractions of world GDP, one or two orders of magnitude larger than the gains from dropping all remaining restrictions on international flows of goods and capital.
ReportDOI

Externalities and Growth

TL;DR: In this article, the authors construct a hybrid of some prominent growth models that have international knowledge externalities and show that the hybrid model does a surprisingly good job of generating realistic dispersion of income levels with modest barriers to technology adoption.
Journal ArticleDOI

Human capital theory: implications for human resource development

TL;DR: In this paper, the authors reviewed definitions of human capital theory by leading economists and HRD scholars, and discussed the link between Human Capital Theory and human development at individual, organizational, community and international levels.
References
More filters
Journal ArticleDOI

A Contribution to the Empirics of Economic Growth

TL;DR: The authors examined whether the Solow growth model is consistent with the international variation in the standard of living, and they showed that an augmented Solow model that includes accumulation of human as well as physical capital provides an excellent description of the cross-country data.
Journal ArticleDOI

Why do Some Countries Produce So Much More Output Per Worker than Others

TL;DR: This article showed that the differences in capital accumulation, productivity, and therefore output per worker are driven by differences in institutions and government policies, which are referred to as social infrastructure and called social infrastructure as endogenous, determined historically by location and other factors captured by language.
Journal ArticleDOI

Returns to investment in education: A global update

TL;DR: In this paper, the authors discuss methodological issues surrounding those estimates and confirm that primary education continues to be the number one investment priority in developing countries, and also show that educating females is marginally more profitable than educating males, and that the academic secondary school curriculum is a better investment than the technical/vocational tract.
Journal ArticleDOI

A New Data Set Measuring Income Inequality

TL;DR: In this paper, a new data set on inequality in the distribution of income is presented, and the authors explain the criteria they applied in selecting data on Gini coefficients and on individual quintile groups' income shares.
Journal ArticleDOI

Does Schooling Cause Growth

TL;DR: In this paper, a model is examined in which the ability to build on the human capital of one's elders plays an important role in linking growth to schooling, and it is shown that the impact of schooling on growth explains less than one third of the empirical cross-country relationship.
Related Papers (5)