Issues in the Theory of Human Capital : Education as Investment

After a few references to the early literature on human capital, from Petty via Smith, Engel, and Nicholson to Marshall, various issues in current theory of human capital are briefly reviewed. They include questions regarding categories of " tangible human capital" and "intangible nonhuman capital;" investment in raising children. in schooling, and in research and development; depreciation of human capital through obsolescence, loss of strength, illness, retirement, and death; conflicts between efficiency and equality in the educational system; wrong educational mix resulting in waste or even net loss; the problem of complementarity among different kinds of physical and human capital; and the complexity of econometric rese3rch on comparative returns to different investments

Por qué discrepan los economistas

Por qué discrepan los economista

Por qué discrepan los economistas

Por qué discrepan los economista

Comments on "Economic policy for the European Community - the way forward". Selection of comments prepared for a Kiel Symposium on the report of the Group of Rome

Table of Contents: Herbert Giersch, Gottfried Haberler, Jan Tumlir, Juergen B. Donges, Bela Balassa, Europe's Role in the World Economy; Fritz Machlup, Johann Schollhorn, Norbert Walter Pascal Salin, Roland Vaubel, Roads to Monetary Union; Willi Albers, Fritz Neumark, Carl S. Shoup, Dieter Biehl, Fiscal Harmonization; Dieter Biehl, Bela Balassa, Claus Noe, Sebastian Schnyder, The Scope of a Common Regional Policy; Adolf Weber, Tim Josling, New Approaches to Structural Policy? Reforming the Common Agricultural Policy; Gerhard Prosi, Gerhard Fels, Klaus Stegemann, New Approaches to Structural Policy? Industrial Policy, Competition and Social Progres

Intellectual Property as a Carrot for Innovators: Using Game Theory to Show the Limits of the Argument

Policymakers all over the world claim: no innovation without protection. For more than a century, critics have objected that the case for intellectual property is far from clear. This paper uses a game theoretic model to organise the debate. It is possible to model innovation as a prisoner's dilemma between potential innovators, and to interpret intellectual property as a tool for making cooperation the equilibrium. However, this model rests on assumptions about cost and benefit that are unlikely to hold, or have even been shown to be wrong, in many empirically relevant situations. Moreover, even if the problem is indeed a prisoner's dilemma, in many situations intellectual property is an inappropriate cure. It sets incentives to race to be the first, or the last, to innovate, as the case may be. In equilibrium, the firms would have to randomise between investment and non-investment, which is unlikely to work out in practice. Frequently, firms would have to invent cooperatively, which proves difficult in larger industries