In an interesting and influential paper Robert Lucas (1993) considering the experience of East Asian small economies, suggests that on the job" learning could be the principal engine of their miraculous growth in the last 20 years. In this paper I develop an overlapping generation model where on...

Young highly educated workers developed in the 70's and 80's a preference for working in larger cities. As a consequence highly educated young workers in 1990 were over-represented in cities, in spite of the lower wage premium they earned for working in crowded metropolitan areas if compared to...

Identification of the strength of human capital externalities at the aggregate level is still not fully understood. The existing method may yield positive or negative externalities even if wages reflect marginal social products. We propose an approach that yields positive average human capital...

In an empirical analysis, considering 236 U.S. cities in the period 1980-1990, we document a strong positive correlation between local supply of skills and their return. In SMSA's where the average education of workers is high the education premium is also high. This is true both considering the...