Human Capital and Financial Development

We study an economy with capital-skill complementarities, an endogenous human capital and occupational choice decision and firm-level financing constraints. We ask: to what extent do financial frictions reduce output per worker across countries? In our economy, firm-level frictions depress physical capital accumulation and, in equilibrium, also reduce the acquisition of human capital, thus amplifying the decline in output per worker. We estimate the model using repeated cross-sections of individual workers' educational attainment, labor earnings and occupational choice, both for U.S. time-series, as well as for a cross-section of countries. We find that financial frictions have much larger effects on output per worker in our economy than they do in economies with a fixed supply of human capital.