Seminar: Economics of Human Capital

The purpose of the seminar is to train the students' abilities to understand human capital as an economic concept and to carry out empirical analyses on micro data using relevant econometric techniques.

Human capital is the stock of skills, knowledge and health that individuals accumulate over the life cycle, and which determines their productivity, earnings and well-being. Following Becker and Grossman, the seminar treats education and health not as separate fields but as two forms of the same underlying investment problem.

The default is that students use the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe (http://www.share-project.org/) to carry out the empirical projects. SHARE is a cross-national panel of individuals aged 50 and over I multiple European countries. It observes education, retrospective childhood conditions, income, employment, health, health behaviors and cognitive test scores for the same individuals across nine waves. For those more interested in schooling and adult skills, other publicly available datasets are PISA ( https://www.oecd.org/en/about/programmes/pisa/pisa-data.html), and PIAAC ( https://www.oecd.org/en/about/programmes/piaac/piaac-data.html). However, students are encouraged to conduct analyses in datasets they find themselves and have access to. They are also encouraged to creatively merge information across different sources.

If students have an alternative and appropriate micro dataset set up by the beginning of the course, they should contact the teacher by the course start, in order to determine the data’s relevance, as it must be within the scope of the seminar.

Generally, the topics are bounded to empirical strategies that can be pursued within the SHARE, PISA, or PIAAC databases. These include inequalities in health, schooling, and human capital accumulation; risky health behaviors; effects of compulsory schooling, health, and retirement policies. For further inspiration students are encouraged to view the long list of publications carried out on SHARE data ( http://www.share-project.org/share-publications/journalarticles00.html).

A central part of the course will be to apply methods on real data. Therefore, the students will be obliged to meet data access requirements laid out by SHARE ( http://www.share-project.org/data-access/user-registration.html). SHARE has made the survey ” easySHARE” available for teaching purposes. PISA and PIAAC data are freely available