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13.9: Key Terms

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    108732

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    Human capital is the stock of expertise accumulated by a worker that determines future productivity and earnings.

    Age-earnings profiles define the pattern of earnings over time for individuals with different characteristics.

    Education premium: the difference in earnings between the more and less highly educated.

    On-the-job training improves human capital through work experience.

    Firm-specific skills raise a worker's productivity in a particular firm.

    General skills enhance productivity in many jobs or firms.

    Signalling is the decision to undertake an action in order to reveal information.

    Screening is the process of obtaining information by observing differences in behaviour.

    Discrimination implies an earnings differential that is attributable to a trait other than human capital.

    Lorenz curve describes the cumulative percentage of the income distribution going to different quantiles of the population.

    Gini index: a measure of how far the Lorenz curve lies from the line of equality. Its maximum value is one; its minimum value is zero.

    This page titled 13.9: Key Terms is shared under a CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 license and was authored, remixed, and/or curated by Douglas Curtis and Ian Irvine (Lyryx) via source content that was edited to the style and standards of the LibreTexts platform; a detailed edit history is available upon request.