IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/cvs/starer/94-25.html

The Transfer of Human Capital

Author

Listed:
  • Jovanovic, Boyan
  • Nyarko, Yaw

Abstract

Most of our productive knowledge was handed down to us by previous generations. The transfer of knowledge from the old to the young is therefore a cornerstone of productivity growth. We study this process in a model in which the old sell knowledge to the young - - old workers train the young, and charge them for this service. We take an information-theoretic approach in which training occurs if a young agent watches an old worker perform a task. This assumption has plenty of empirical support -- in their first three months on the job, young workers spend about five times as long watching others work as they do in formal training programs. Equilibrium is not constrained Pareto optimal. The old have private information, and this gives rise to an adverse selection problem: some old agents manage to sell skills that the young would not buy (if only they knew exactly what they were buying). We derive the implications for the lifetime of technological lines, and we show that the model generates a negative relation between a firm's productivity and its probability of failure.
(This abstract was borrowed from another version of this item.)
(This abstract was borrowed from another version of this item.)
(This abstract was borrowed from another version of this item.)
(This abstract was borrowed from another version of this item.)
(This abstract was borrowed from another version of this item.)
(This abstract was borrowed from another version of this item.)
(This abstract was borrowed from another version of this item.)
(This abstract was borrowed from another version of this item.)
(This abstract was borrowed from another version of this item.)
(This abstract was borrowed from another version of this item.)
(This abstract was borrowed from another version of this item.)
(T
(This abstract was borrowed from another version of this item.)

Suggested Citation

  • Jovanovic, Boyan & Nyarko, Yaw, 1994. "The Transfer of Human Capital," Working Papers 94-25, C.V. Starr Center for Applied Economics, New York University.
    • Handle: RePEc:cvs:starer:94-25
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    To our knowledge, this item is not available for download. To find whether it is available, there are three options:
    1. Check below whether another version of this item is available online.
    2. Check on the provider's web page whether it is in fact available.
    3. Perform a
    for a similarly titled item that would be available.

    Other versions of this item:

    More about this item

    Keywords

    ;
    ;
    ;

    JEL classification:

    • J24 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Demand and Supply of Labor - - - Human Capital; Skills; Occupational Choice; Labor Productivity

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:cvs:starer:94-25. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Anne Stubing The email address of this maintainer does not seem to be valid anymore. Please ask Anne Stubing to update the entry or send us the correct address (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/aenyuus.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.