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Human Capital Accumulation, Social Mobility and Migrations
Author(s) -
Pozzolo Alberto
Publication year - 1999
Publication title -
labour
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.403
H-Index - 34
eISSN - 1467-9914
pISSN - 1121-7081
DOI - 10.1111/1467-9914.00110
Subject(s) - earnings , human capital , economics , labour economics , imperfect , demographic economics , per capita , social mobility , distribution (mathematics) , per capita income , population , economic growth , demography , mathematical analysis , linguistics , philosophy , social science , mathematics , accounting , sociology
This paper studies the effects of migrations on growth and income distribution when social mobility is imperfect. Workers migrate in response to differences in expected wages between home and a foreign country, but their choice depends also whether they qualified themselves as skilled workers by accumulating human capital or not. Such an activity has a cost, which depends on each agent’s family background: sons of skilled workers have lower human capital accumulation costs. The effects of labour migrations on per capita income depend only on the degree of social mobility: if there is a difference in the cost of accumulating human capital for the sons of educated and non‐educated people, migrations reduce total earnings of unskilled workers in the receiving country, and increase those of skilled workers.