What Does Human Capital Do? A Review of Goldin and Katz's The Race between Education and Technology
Name
Acemoglu12-02.pdf
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807.59 KB
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Adobe PDF
Checksum (MD5)
a878e37e28d3af09a4f04e31ecc220f1
Author(s)
Acemoglu, Daron
Autor, David
Date Issued
March 7, 2012
Publisher
Cambridge, MA: Department of Economics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Series/Report no.
Working Papers;Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Economics;12-02
Abstract
Goldin and Katz’s The Race between Education and Technology is a monumental achievement that supplies a unified framework for interpreting how the demand and supply of human capital have shaped the distribution of earnings in the U.S. labor market over the 20th century. This essay reviews the theoretical and conceptual underpinnings of this work and documents the success of Goldin and Katz’s framework in accounting for numerous broad labor market trends. The essay also considers areas where the framework falls short in explaining several key labor market puzzles of recent decades and argues that these shortcomings can potentially be overcome by relaxing the implicit equivalence drawn between workers’ skills and their job tasks in the conceptual framework on which Goldin and Katz build. The essay argues that allowing for a richer set of interactions between skills and technologies in accomplishing job tasks both augments and refines the predictions of Goldin and Katz’s approach and suggests an even more important role for human capital in economic growth than indicated by their analysis.
Description
This revision: February 2, 2012. Original submission: January 11, 2012.
Subjects
earnings
education
economic growth
inequality
human capital
skills
skill-biased technological change
tasks
technology
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