Unequal Opportunities and Human Capital Formation
By Daniel Mejía, Marc St-Pierre. Social Science Research Network, 2006
115 citations recorded by the source corpus.
This paper develops a tractable, heterogeneous agents general equilibrium model where individuals have different endowments of the factors that complement the schooling process. The paper explores the relationship between inequality of opportunities, inequality of outcomes, and aggregate efficiency in human capital formation. Using numerical solutions we study how the endogenous variables of the model respond to two different interventions in the distribution of opportunities: a mean-preserving spread and a change in the support. The results suggest that a higher degree of inequality of opportunities is associated with lower average level of human capital, a lower fraction of individuals investing in human capital, higher inequality in the distribution of human capital, and higher wage inequality. In particular, the model does not predict a trade-off between aggregate efficiency in human capital formation (as measured by the average level of human capital in the economy) and equality of opportunity.
Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Sociology and Political Science
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/8d5473b642241f2b0d6cc047f40d2a1ee7866de3
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Citations in the corpus
- Inequality, Human Capital Formation and the Process of Development (2011, unknown): “…and intergenerational mobility is robust to the removal of credit market imperfections as long as parental human capital and social background are introduced into the analysis (Galor and Tsiddon, 1997a, 1997b;Hassler and Mora, 2000; Zilcha, 2003; Mejía and St-Pierre, 2008; Brezis and Temin, 2008).”
- Human Capital Theory (2014, background): “Therefore, countries with corrupt government officials, ponderous bureaucracy, poor law enforcement, and unequal opportunities poorly perform in terms of human capital formation and outcomes (see the OECD report by Mejia & Pierre, 2008; Pissarides, 2000).”