| 摘要: | 研究期間：10108~10207;The traditional view of human capital ties schooling to labor productivity. However, in recent years, economists have paid increasing attention to the role of schooling for developing social behavior. As an important example, Akerlof and Kranton (2002) discuss how schools are social institutions that are designed with two goals: to impart academic knowledge and to help develop students’ social skills. Importantly, in contrast to traditional economic reasoning, the returns to social investments are likely to be significant (Gradstein and Justman (2000, 2002) and Heckman et al. (2006)).Given this background, Montgomery (1991), Krauth (2004), and Calvo-Armengol and Jackson (2004) develop theoretical models to analyze the effects of social networks on employment. However, these papers regard social connections as exogenous, unrelated to other types of investment decisions. In order to fill this gap, Reed and Tsaur (2011) seek to examine the determination of investments in cognitive skills along with behavioral skills in the context of equilibrium unemployment. Nevertheless, they study a Walrasian labor market where workers retain all production as earnings.A novel introduction of this proposed project is to explicitly incorporate the relationship between investment in social capital and bargaining power into the theoretical framework. To be specific, I construct a discrete-infinite-horizon model with investments in two distinct types of human capital–knowledge capital and social capital–in the presence of equilibrium unemployment. On the one hand, investment in knowledge capital affects an individual’s productivity on the job. On the other hand, investment in social capital has affects the individual’s bargaining power over wage.My main hypothesis is that although social investments lead to lower transactions costs in the labor market, equilibrium social interaction is inefficiently low. It is because individuals do not take into account that their social investments improve the flow of information in the labor market. In turn, the economy’s unemployment rate is inefficiently high. More interestingly, some labor-market policy implications emerge from this framework. For example, the social costs of unemployment compensation programs are more significant when policy makers take into account the impact of unemployment benefits on individuals’ incentives to engage in social interactions.To sum up, the objective of the proposed project is twofold. The first objective is to build a framework capable of studying the socializing role of education along with investments in cognitive skills. In particular, I investigate these investments in an economy where individuals face the possibility of unemployment. Secondly and more importantly, this framework reminds policy makers that fail to account for the impact of social interactions poses a significant barrier to optimal policy evaluation. |
