Unemployment and increasing private returns to human capital

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: SaintPaul, G
• 署名单位: Centre for Economic Policy Research - UK
• 刊物名称: JOURNAL OF PUBLIC ECONOMICS
• ISSN/ISSBN: 0047-2727
• DOI: 10.1016/0047-2727(95)01552-3
• 发表日期: 1996
• 页码: 1-20
• 关键词: unemployment; real wages; education; human capital; skills; multiple equilibria

摘要

This paper studies a model of human capital accumulation with real wage rigidity. It is shown that the arbitrage condition between hiring a skilled vs. an unskilled worker may be stated as a positive relationship between their relative unemployment rates. It may be the case that this locus is steep enough to generate increasing returns to education. This may lead to multiple equilibria: a high-education equilibrium may co-exist with a low-education equilibrium. In the former, the unskilled are more exposed to unemployment relative to the skilled, as compared with the latter. The two equilibria cannot be Pareto-ranked, but the latter is preferred to the former by workers, while 'savers' prefer the high-education one.