TY  - JOUR
AU  - Gronau, Reuben
TI  - Zvi Griliches' Contribution to the Theory of Human Capital
JF  - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series
VL  - No. 10081
PY  - 2003
Y2  - November 2003
DO  - 10.3386/w10081
UR  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w10081
L1  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w10081.pdf
N1  - Author contact info:
Reuben Gronau
Department of Economics
Hebrew University
Mount Scopus, Jerusalem  91905
ISRAEL
Tel: 972-2-588-3145
Fax: 972-2-5816071
E-Mail: msreuben@mscc.huji.ac.il
M1  - published as Reuben Gronau. "Zvi Griliches' Contribution to the Theory of Human Capital," in Jacques Mairesse and Manuel Trajtenberg, editors, "Contributions in Memory of Zvi Griliches" Annales D'Économie et de Statistique, 79-80, July-December 2005 (2010)

AB  - The paper discusses Zvi Griliches' contribution to the estimation of the earning function. The topic was the central theme of Griliches' research agenda during the 70s. Griliches played a major role in the ability- schooling controversy of the time. He was instrumental in repelling the attack of the  revisionists' on the Theory of Human Capital, and the claim that the schooling effect in the earning function is merely an artifact of the true ability' and  family background' effects. Griliches lacked at the time the proper data to prove unequivocally that the ability bias plays only a minor role in the estimation of the rate of return to schooling. He was, however, able to show that the seemingly foolproof evidence of his opponents suffers from serious biases due to the endogeneity and the measurement errors in the schooling variable. His assertion that the standard OLS estimator is biased downward, rather than upward, has been shown true by future research.
ER  -