We pursue a cross-country comparison of relative financial readiness of older households in Japan and the Republic of Korea relative to the United States. Our comparative analysis, using macro-level and harmonized longitudinal household financial data, covers the principal financial channels of old-age support: public and private pension plans, family support, and self-management of private financial portfolios. We find that while all three countries have similar public pension systems, older Americans benefit from more developed and better-funded public and private pension systems, as well as individual management of risky financial portfolios. We find that educational and health attainments of household heads and household wealth lead to a greater tendency to hold and manage risky assets. Our decomposition analysis also shows that the gap in stock ownership in Asian countries relative to the United States can be attributed to lower levels of development in financial and pension markets. However, these gaps have been shrinking more recently.

We evaluate the economic consequences of endogenous immigration in a two-country, two-skill, endogenous-growth model, where human and physical capital are the productive assets. Adding physical capital to the model yields new insights about the induced-immigration effects of exogenous pull and push triggers, on the evolution of the “immigration surplus” in the short versus the long run, in destination versus source countries, and in the global economy. The policy effects we analyze include the easing of constraints affecting labor and physical capital mobility at the individual-migrant level and the role of physical capital endowments. We also analyze the origin and implications of the asymmetries in the net benefits from immigration across destination and source countries.

Unlike physical capital, human capital has both embodied and disembodied dimensions. It can be perceived not only as skill and acquired knowledge but also as knowledge spillover effects between overlapping generations and across different skill groups within and across countries. We illustrate the roles these characteristics play in the process of economic development, the relation between income growth and income and fertility distributions, and the relevance of human capital in determining the skill distribution of immigrants in a balanced-growth global equilibrium setting. In all three illustrations, knowledge spillover effects play a key role. The analysis offers new insights for understanding the decline in fertility below the population replacement rate in many developed countries, the evolution of income and fertility distributions across developing and developed countries, and the often asymmetric effects that endogenous immigration flows and their skill composition exert on the long-term net benefits from immigration to natives in source and destination countries.

Extending Ehrlich et al.’s (2008, 2011) labor-theoretic, rational-expectations model of asset management (AM), we investigate the interplay between AM and portfolio choices of older-age households in a sample of 11 European countries plus Israel over 5 waves of the SHARE longitudinal data in the period 2004-2015. Our analysis shows that education, health, and other components of human capital, generally determine the reduced-form demand for, or portfolio shares of, risky assets, the derived-demand for asset management time, and the household’s portfolio returns. Moreover, we find that education and underlying health conditions affect these portfolio outcomes largely through proxies of time household heads devote to asset management. Our key findings hold up against a battery of robustness and internal validation tests based on reduced-form and structural IV regressions, alternative regression specifications, and alternative groups of investors. We also find that the effects of education on the demand for AM time, risky financial assets, and portfolio returns, become larger as the opportunity costs of AM fall with age, which supports the mechanism of the asset management hypothesis.

Because of limited intermediate-care services, patients with autism spectrum disorders (ASDs) are increasingly being treated in emergency departments (EDs) and psychiatric hospitals. To address this growing problem, the authors developed a mobile outreach program, called Access to Psychiatry through Intermediate Care (APIC), for young (#26 years) patients with ASD at risk for involvement with emergency medical services or the legal system. In its initial year, the average program duration per patient was 264.5 days. Clinical and Family Distress Scale scores indicated significant improvements for participating patients and caretakers. In the first year, among 40 patients with sufficient data for comparison, 13 (33%) went to the ED, and lengths of stay decreased up to 77% from pre- to postintervention. Given a cost per APIC-enrolled patient of $1,700, the net saving for the cost of ED treatment was $2,260-$2,559 per patient. The feasibility and cost-effectiveness of the APIC model has attracted additional state and county funding.

I am happy to introduce the second volume of the Journal of Human Capital ’s special issue celebrating the life and work of Gary Becker. The first volume, published in the JHC last year (Summer 2018, vol. 12, no. 2), contains a collection of papers that were presented in a conference held at the Becker-Friedman Institute at the University of Chicago on October 16, 2015. We are gratified by the favorable reactionsmany of our readers have expressed about that volume, which focused largely on the central contribution of Gary Becker to economics—his seminal work on the role of investment in, and the accumulation of, human capital as a productive asset, which Becker believed to be as important as, if not more important than, the role of physical capital in the economy. The papers and web supplements appearing in that volume (https://www.journals.uchicago.edu /toc/jhc/2018/12/2) constitute just the “first serving” of the journal’s celebration of Becker’s life and work. As I noted at the end of my introduction to the first volume, the JHC had received almost as many equally meritorious papers from Becker’s long-time colleagues and students that could not be included in the 2015 conference and the first volume because of time and space constraints. These papers, which are presented in this volume, thus constitute the “second serving” of our celebration. Indeed, the second serving of the celebration of Becker’s life and work may be even more exciting, as it includes a surprise—a wonderful contribution by Gary Becker to his own memorial celebration! The article “Preference Formation within Families” by Gary S. Becker, dated 1992, is not a submission we received from another world. It is a current discovery by Guity Nashat Becker, Gary’s wife, with the help of a number of Gary’s students, in one of the many drawers and storage compartments at Gary’s home study. The article was foundwith a treasure trove of other unpublished papers Gary had written. Fortunately, three of these students, Julio Elías, Kevin Murphy, and Casey Mulligan, have un-

This paper offers a thesis for why the US overtook the UK and other European countries in the 20th century in both aggregate and per capita GDP as a case study of recent models of endogenous growth, where "human capital" is the engine of growth. By human capital we mean an intangible asset, best thought of as a stock of embodied and disembodied knowledge comprising education, information, entrepreneurship, and productive and innovative skills, which is formed through investments in schooling, job training, and health as well as through research and development projects and informal knowledge transfers (cf. Ehrlich and Murphy 2007).The conjecture is that the ascendancy of the US as an economic superpower in the 20th century owes considerably to its faster human capital formation relative to that of the UK and "old Europe." This paper assesses whether the thesis has legs to stand on through both stylized facts and a supplementary quasi-experimental empirical analysis. The stylized facts indicate that the US led other major developed countries in schooling attainments per adult population member, beginning in the latter part of the 19th century and lasting throughout the 20th century, especially at the secondary and tertiary levels.The quasi-experimental analysis constitutes the first attempt to test the hypothesis that the US's ascendancy to a major economic power stems largely from the impact of the first Morrill Act of 1862, which launched the public higher education movement in the US through the establishment of land grant colleges and universities across the nation during the latter part of the 19th century. The higher education movement appears to have spearheaded a higher long-term rate of growth in per capita income in the US relative to the UK and other major European countries.

Maddison’s international panel data show that technically it was the faster growth rate of the US economy that led to its overtaking the UK as economic superpower. We explore the contributing factors. Identifying the land-grant colleges system triggered by the 1862/1890 Morrill Acts (MAs) as a major contributor, we develop this hypothesis theoretically and test it via difference-in-differences regression analyses viewing the MAs as the experiment, the US or US states as treatment groups, and the UK as chief control group in the country-level comparisons. Using national and state-level data, we estimate that the MAs produced sizeable educational and economic returns which catapulted the US into its leading status.

The problem of the uninsured cannot be fully understood without considering the role of non-market alternatives to ‘market insurance’ called ‘self-insurance’ and ‘self-protection’ (SISP), including the public ‘health care safety-net’ system. We tackle the problem by formulating a ‘full-insurance’ paradigm that accounts for all four interacting insurance measures. We apply two versions of the full-insurance model to estimate, via calibrated simulations, the impacts of SISP on the fraction of uninsured, health spending, and health levels, and to assess how the mandated Affordable Care Act might affect these outcomes in comparison with the CBO projections in 2010. The results indicate that policy analyses which overlook the role of the real price of market insurance relative to the shadow prices of SISP in determining the decision to insure can grossly distort the capacity of mandated reforms like the ACA to insure the uninsured, contain overall health care costs, and improve health and welfare outcomes.

Previous articleNext article No AccessCelebrating the Life and Work of Gary BeckerIsaac EhrlichIsaac EhrlichEditor-in-Chief Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Journal of Human Capital Volume 12, Number 2Summer 2018 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/697937 Views: 123Total views on this site Citations: 2Citations are reported from Crossref © 2018 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports the following articles citing this article:Somdeep Chatterjee and Jai Kamal Long-Term Labor Market Consequences of Costly Signaling: Evidence from a Natural Experiment, Journal of Human Capital 15, no.44 (Oct 2021): 596–628.https://doi.org/10.1086/716345Orhan Torul Education in a Heterogeneous-Agent Economy: Revisiting Transatlantic Differences, Journal of Human Capital 14, no.22 (Jul 2020): 165–216.https://doi.org/10.1086/708650

Previous articleNext article No AccessSpecial Issue in Honor of Ronald H. CoaseIsaac EhrlichIsaac EhrlichEditor-in-Chief Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull TextSupplemental Material Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Journal of Human Capital Volume 11, Number 3Fall 2017 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/693905 Views: 57Total views on this site © 2017 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

We model investment in entrepreneurial human capital (EHC)—the representative enterprise’s share of production capacity allocated to investment in innovative industrial and commercial knowledge—as a distinct channel through which firm-specific human capital drives endogenous growth. Our model suggests that institutional factors supporting free markets for goods and ideas and higher-educational attainments of entrepreneurs and workers enhance endogenous economic growth by augmenting the efficiency of investment in EHC rather than exclusively by themselves. We test these implications, using data from Global Entrepreneurship Monitor’s Adult Population Survey of 63 countries over 2002–10, and find robust support for these hypotheses.

This chapter discusses the economic approach to crime. By applying the tools of economic analysis and econometric methodology, it serves as a unified approach for understanding illegal behaviour as part of human behaviour in general. It offers new insights about the relative efficiency and desirability of means of crime control and components of the law enforcement system. The economic approach, and the “market model” linking it to the general methodology used by economists to study and interpret the general economy, remains a work in progress, because the data are not available to the degree they are collected and reported in other areas of economic inquiry. It is still too early to assess the degree to which the various econometric studies have produced accurate estimates of critical behavioral relationships underlying variations and conflicting trends of crime. Progress depends on better data and more complete implementations of the comprehensive model of crime.

Census data from international sources covering 77 percent of the world’s migrant population indicate that the skill composition of migrants in major destination countries, including the United States, has been rising over the last four decades. Moreover, the population share of skilled migrants has been approaching or exceeding that of skilled natives. We offer theoretical propositions and empirical tests consistent with these trends via a general equilibrium model of endogenous growth in which human capital, population, income growth and distribution, and migration trends are endogenous. We derive new insights about the impact of migration on long-term income growth and distribution and the net benefits to natives in both destination and source countries.

The apparently unrelenting growth in the GDP-share of health spending (SHS) has been a perennial issue of policy concern.Does an equilibrium limit exist?The issue has been left open in recent dynamic models which take income growth and population aging as given.We view these variables as endogenously determined within an overlapping-generations, human-capital-based endogenous-growth model, where a representative parent makes all life-cycle consumption and investment decisions and life and health protection are subject to diminishing returns.Our prototype model, allowing for both quantity and quality of life as desired goods, yields equilibrium upper bounds for SHS.Our calibrated simulations also account for observed trends in reproductive choices, population aging, life expectancy, and economic growth.The analysis offers new insights about factors that drive long-term trends in aging and health spending and establishes a direct relation between health investments at young age and the equilibrium, steady-state rate of economic growth.

Existing forecasts of a continuously rising income share of health spending (SHS) take per capita income growth and population aging as given. We develop a human capital-based endogenous growth model treating these variables as endogenously determined. In this private-economy setting, SHS has equilibrium upper bounds due to rising shadow prices of life and health protection. Our calibrated simulations reproduce observed trends in fertility and life expectancy and account for advances in life protection and health maintenance technologies. The model identifies the major forces driving the dynamic path of SHS and uncovers a direct link between health investment at young age and the equilibrium rate of economic growth.

In preparing for the RIO+20 Earth Summit, the world community must acknowledge that population trends interact strongly with economic development and environmental change at local and global levels. The International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA) recently convened leading experts to consider how demographic factors promote or impede sustainable development. The panel concluded that human beings—their numbers, distribution, and characteristics—are at the center of concern for sustainable development ([ 1 ][1]). The evidence is clear that demographic differences fundamentally affect people's contribution to environmental burdens, their ability to participate in sustainable development, and their adaptability to a changing environment. The developmental challenges are by far the most significant where population growth and poverty are the highest, education is the lowest, and vulnerabilities to environmental change are the greatest. Within families, women and children are most vulnerable. As members of this panel, we put forward five action implications: (i) Recognize that the numbers, characteristics, and behaviors of people are at the heart of sustainable development challenges and of their solutions. (ii) Identify subpopulations that contribute most to environmental degradation and those that are most vulnerable to its consequences. In poor countries especially, these subpopulations are readily identifiable according to age, gender, level of education, place of residence, and standard of living. (iii) Devise sustainable development policies to treat these subpopulations differently and appropriately, according to their demographic and behavioral characteristics. (iv) Facilitate the inevitable trend of increasing urbanization in ways that ensure that environmental hazards and vulnerabilities are under control. (v) Invest in human capital—people's education and health, including reproductive health—to slow population growth, accelerate the transition to green technologies, and improve people's adaptive capacity to environmental change. 1. [↵][2] IIASA, World Population Program, Demographic Challenges for Sustainable Development ([www.iiasa.ac.at/Research/POP/Laxenburg%20Declaration%20on%20Population%20and%20Development.html][3]). [1]: #ref-1 [2]: #xref-ref-1-1 View reference 1 in text [3]: http://www.iiasa.ac.at/Research/POP/Laxenburg%20Declaration%20on%20Population%20and%20Development.html

Using a prototype human capital based growth model without borrowing restrictions and government intervention, we study the dynamic evolution of aggregate output and income inequality. We show how even barebones models can yield some testable implications about the growth-inequality relation that may square nicely with the empirical reality. We also provide some useful speculations about this relation over different stages of economic development.

By allowing for imperfectly informed markets and the role of private information, we offer new insights about observed deviations of portfolio concentrations in domestic relative to foreign risky assets, or "home bias", from what standard finance models predict. Our model ascribes the "bias" to endogenous information acquisition bolstered by investors' human capital. We develop discriminating hypotheses about the influence of "specific" and "general" human capital endowments and direct and opportunity costs of managing risky assets in determining whether to hold these assets, and how the assets' portfolio shares vary across investors and financial markets. These hypotheses are supported by numerical and econometric analyses of panel data from the US over 1992-2007, and 23 international financial markets over 2001-2007. The results indicate the existence of differences across countries in the degree to which home asset prices are "information-revealing", which may be relevant for fully understanding the global financial crisis of 2007-09.