Human Capital and Development Accounting: New Evidence from Wage Gains at Migration*
利用移民到美国前后的工资数据，发现来自穷国的移民工资增长仅为两国人均GDP差距的40%，表明国家因素仅解释40%的收入差异，人力资本解释其余60%。
We reconsider the role for human capital in accounting for cross-country income differences. Our contribution is to bring to bear new data on the pre- and post- migration labor market experiences of immigrants to the U.S. Immigrants from poor countries experience wage gains that are only 40 percent of the GDP per worker gap. This fact implies that “country†accounts for only 40 percent of cross-country income differences, while human capital accounts for the other 60 percent. Our work deals with two well-known problems in the literature. It controls for selection by using data on the wages of the same individual in two different countries. We provide evidence on the importance of skill transfer by comparing pre- and post-migration occupations. Occupational downgrading at migration is common; corrections for this imply that human capital may account for as little as 50 percent of cross-country income differences.