What Does Human Capital Do? A Review of Goldin and Katz's The Race between Education and Technology
Name
Acemoglu_What does.pdf
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555.62 KB
Format
Adobe PDF
Checksum (MD5)
7106aef4697257c01777c5f1b01a938f
Author(s)
Acemoglu, Daron
Autor, David H.
Date Issued
June 2012
Journal
Journal of Economic Literature
Publisher
American Economic Association
Citation
Acemoglu, Daron and David Autor. "What Does Human Capital Do? A Review of Goldin and Katz's The Race between Education and Technology." Journal of Economic Literature, 50(2): 426-63.
Version
Author's final manuscript
Abstract
Goldin and Katz s The Race between Education and Technology is a monumental achievement that
supplies a uni ed 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 re nes 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.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Economics
Terms of Use
Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0
Persistent DSpace Link
DOI of Published Version
http://dx.doi.org/10.1257/jel.50.2.426
https://doi.org/10.1257/jel.50.2.426
