The Theory of Human Capital Revisited: On the Interaction of General and Specific Investments
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Human capital theory distinguishes between training in general‐usage and firm‐specific skills. Becker (1964) argues that employers will only invest in specific training, not general training, when labour markets are competitive. The article reconsiders Becker’s theory. Using essentially his framework, we show that there exists an incentive complementarity between employer‐sponsored general and specific training: the possibility to provide specific training leads the employer to invest in general human capital. Conversely, the latter reduces the hold‐up problem that arises with firm‐specific training. We also consider the desirability of institutionalised training programmes and the virtues of breach penalties, and discuss some empirical facts that could be explained by the theory.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.016 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.009 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.005 | 0.006 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.010 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".