Human Capital, the Organization of Production, and Economic Development - HUMANDEV

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Human capital is a central ingredient of the development process. While the literature has made progress in measuring the variation of human skills across countries and over time, we still have a limited understanding of the channels through which they shape the organisation of production and economic development. This is complicated by the growing realization that human capital is a multidimensional object, given the variety of skills embodied in workers on one hand, and the heterogeneity across firms, occupations, sectors, and countries in their utilization on the other.HUMANDEV will leverage micro-level data from multiple countries and novel theoretical frameworks to shed light on the role of human capital for the past and future of economic development. The project is structured around three Work Packages, studying how the accumulation and utilization of different types of skills is shaped by and can facilitate the adaptation to some of the most pressing challenges faced by the global economy: population ageing (Work Package 1), climate change (Work Package 2), and the reallocation of workers across economic activities (Work Package 3). Each Work Package will involve three complementary contributions:1. Collecting and harmonizing micro-level data from countries at different levels of development to construct novel facts on the accumulation and utilization of human skills in a variety of contexts.2. Developing new theoretical frameworks to provide a structural interpretation of the empirical facts.3. Estimating the key parameters of these models and implementing counterfactual exercises to assess the effects of different economic scenarios and policy proposals.The findings of HUMANDEV will shed light on the present and future contribution of human capital to economic development, and on how policy can help equip labour forces in developing countries for the impending socio-economic transformations.