Human Capital Investment under Asymmetric Information: The Pigovian Conjecture Revisited
研究当现任雇主比潜在雇主更了解工人生产力时，人力资本投资、劳动力流动和工资如何共同决定，发现信息不对称会导致人力资本投资的外部性扭曲，且通用型人力资本的投资不足问题比企业专用型更严重。
This article investigates how human capital investment, labor turnover, and wages are jointly determined when the current employer knows more about a worker's productivity than potential employers. Results derived are quite different from, or unexplored by, the standard human capital theory. The authors show that the information asymmetry can cause an externality distortion in human capital investment because higher productivity due to the investment may not be recognized by the market. The investment level increases in the degree of firm specificity of human capital. The underinvestment problem is more severe when human capital is general than when it is firm-specific. Copyright 1996 by University of Chicago Press.