The cyclical behavior of the acquisition of skills over the life-cycle is investigated. The OLG model employed includes the human capital production sector of Heckman (1976) that has two possible responses in skill acquisition to a productivity shock; a substitution and an income effect. The calibrated model predicts, for all age groups, that the substitution effect dominates the income effect implying opportunity-cost considerations tend to make schooling countercyclical. However, the data on college enrollments suggests that the ability-to-pay consideration, or the income effect, is more important for the very young since enrollments for the recently graduated from high-school are procyclical. By making human capital acquisition shocks positively correlated with the TFP shock, the income effect of the young is increased thereby replicating the observed data.
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Paper provided by Middle Tennessee State University, Department of Economics and Finance in its series Working Papers with number
200402.
References listed on IDEAS Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.:
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James Heckman & Pedro Carneiro, 2003.
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[Downloadable!] (restricted)
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