We analyze an economy populated by a sequence of generations who decide over their consumption levels and the levels of investment in human capital of their immediate descendants. The objective of the paper is to identify the impact of strategic interactions between consecutive generations on the time path of human capital accumulation. To this end, we characterize the Markov perfect equilibrium (MPE) in such an economy and derive the sufficient conditions for its existence and uniqueness. The equilibrium path is computed using a novel constructive approach: extending Reffett and Woźny (2008), we put forward an iterative procedure which converges to the MPE as its limit. To benchmark our results, we also calculate the optimal human capital accumulation paths for (i) a Ramsey-type model with dynastic optimization, and (ii) a model with joy-of-giving altruism. We prove analytically that human capital accumulation is unambiguously lower in the "strategic" model than in the Ramsey-type dynastic model. We complement our results with a series of numerical exercises.
Download Info
To download:
If you experience problems downloading a file, check if you have the
proper application to
view it first. Information about this may be contained
in the File-Format links below. In case of further problems read
the IDEAS help
file. Note that these files are not on the IDEAS
site. Please be patient as the files may be large.
Publisher Info
Paper provided by University Library of Munich, Germany in its series MPRA Paper with number
10308.
Find related papers by JEL classification: I20 - Health, Education, and Welfare - - Education - - - General J22 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Demand and Supply of Labor - - - Time Allocation and Labor Supply C73 - Mathematical and Quantitative Methods - - Game Theory and Bargaining Theory - - - Stochastic and Dynamic Games; Evolutionary Games
This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:
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.: