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What Does Human Capital Do? A Review of Goldin and Katz's The Race between Education and Technology

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  • Daron Acemoglu
  • David Autor

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.

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Paper provided by National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc in its series NBER Working Papers with number 17820.

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Date of creation: Feb 2012
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Handle: RePEc:nbr:nberwo:17820

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  1. Jonathan Vogel & Arnaud Costinot, 2008. "Matching and Inequality in the World Economy," 2008 Meeting Papers 879, Society for Economic Dynamics.
  2. James J. Heckman & Paul A. LaFontaine, 2010. "The American High School Graduation Rate: Trends and Levels," The Review of Economics and Statistics, MIT Press, vol. 92(2), pages 244-262, May.
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  1. American failure
    by Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson in Why Nations Fail on 2012-04-23 14:26:00
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Cited by:
  1. Miguel Sánchez Romero & Joze Sambt & Alexia Prskawetz, 2012. "Quantifying the role of alternative pension reforms on the Austrian economy," MPIDR Working Papers WP-2012-026, Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research, Rostock, Germany.

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