scholarly journals Human Capital Dynamics and the U.S. Labor Market

2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jun Nie ◽  
Lei Feng
Keyword(s):  
10.3982/qe653 ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 10 (4) ◽  
pp. 1317-1356 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hans A. Holter ◽  
Dirk Krueger ◽  
Serhiy Stepanchuk

How much additional tax revenue can the government generate by increasing the level of labor income taxes? In this paper, we argue that the degree of tax progressivity is a quantitatively important determinant of the answer to this question. To make this point, we develop a large scale overlapping generations model with single and married households facing idiosyncratic income risk, extensive and intensive margins of labor supply, as well as endogenous accumulation of human capital through labor market experience. We calibrate the model to U.S. macro, micro, and tax data and characterize the labor income tax Laffer curve for various degrees of tax progressivity. We find that the peak of the U.S. Laffer curve is attained at an average labor income tax rate of 58 % . This peak (the maximal tax revenues the government can raise) increases by 7 % if the current progressive tax code is replaced with a flat labor income tax. Replacing the current U.S. tax system with one that has Denmark' s progressivity would lower the peak by 8 % . We show that modeling the extensive margin of labor supply and endogenous human capital accumulation is crucial for these findings. With joint taxation of married couples (as in the U.S.), higher tax progressivity leads to significantly lower labor force participation of married women and substantially higher labor force participation of single women, an effect that is especially pronounced when future wages of females depend positively on past labor market experience.


2017 ◽  
Vol 50 (1) ◽  
pp. 13-37 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rebecca Rubin Damari ◽  
William P. Rivers ◽  
Richard D. Brecht ◽  
Philip Gardner ◽  
Catherine Pulupa ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  

2012 ◽  
Vol 50 (2) ◽  
pp. 426-463 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daron Acemoglu ◽  
David Autor

Goldin and Katz's The Race between Education and Technology is a monumental achievement that supplies a unified framework for interpreting how the demand and supply of human capital have shaped the distribution of earnings in the U.S. labor market over the twentieth century. This essay reviews the theoretical and conceptual underpinnings of this work and documents the success of Goldin and Katz's framework in accounting for numerous broad labor market trends. The essay also considers areas where the framework falls short in explaining several key labor market puzzles of recent decades and argues that these shortcomings can potentially be overcome by relaxing the implicit equivalence drawn between workers' skills and their job tasks in the conceptual framework on which Goldin and Katz build. The essay argues that allowing for a richer set of interactions between skills and technologies in accomplishing job tasks both augments and refines the predictions of Goldin and Katz's approach and suggests an even more important role for human capital in economic growth than indicated by their analysis. (JEL I20, J24, J31, O30)


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