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Concept
Human capital
Summary
Human capital is a concept used by economists to designate personal attributes considered useful in the production process. It encompasses employee knowledge, skills, know-how, good health, and education. Human capital has a substantial impact on individual earnings. Research indicates that human capital investments have high economic returns throughout childhood and young adulthood.
Companies can invest in human capital, for example, through education and training, enabling improved levels of quality and production.
As a result of his conceptualization and modeling work using Human Capital as a key factor, the 2018 Nobel Prize for Economics was jointly awarded to Paul Romer, who founded the modern innovation-driven approach to understanding economic growth.
In the recent literature, the new concept of task-specific human capital was coined in 2004 by Robert Gibbons, an economist at MIT, and Michael Waldman, an economist at Cornell University. The concept emphasizes that in many cases, human capital is accumulated specific to the nature of the task (or, skills required for the task), and the human capital accumulated for the task are valuable to many firms requiring the transferable skills. This concept can be applied to job-assignment, wage dynamics, tournament, promotion dynamics inside firms, etc.
Adam Smith included in his definition of capital "the acquired and useful abilities of all the inhabitants or members of the society". The first use of the
term "human capital" may be by Irving Fisher. An early discussion with the phrase "human capital" was from Arthur Cecil Pigou:
There is such a thing as investment in human capital as well as investment in material capital. So soon as this is recognised, the distinction between economy in consumption and economy in investment becomes blurred. For, up to a point, consumption is investment in personal productive capacity. This is especially important in connection with children: reducing unduly expenditure on their consumption may greatly lower their efficiency in after-life.
Official source
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