Process of accumulation of Italian human capital

Human capital (HC), from the economical point of view, is defined as a stock variable that represents the capacity of an individual generated by investment in education and work experience to produce a sustained flow of income throughout the life span. The proposed approaches that consider HC as unidimensional latent variable are recent and start from the economic theory specified in Dagum's recursive model [Dagum, C., 1994. Human capital, income and wealth distribution models and their applications to the USA. In: Proceedings of the American Statistical Association, pp. 253-258] which purports to explain the determination and the distribution of income, wealth, debt and HC. The aim of the present article is to generalize the previous approaches to the case of human capital conceived as a latent variable, composed by two main dimensions (Education HC and Work experience HC), underlying the process of determination of earned and capital income. The model is applied to the estimate of Italian household human capital in 2000 and compared with the US household human capital. © 2008 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.