The Incubator of Human Capital: The NBER and the Rise of the Human Capital Paradigm

The human capital construct is deep in the bones of economics and finds reference by many classical economists, even if they did not use the phrase. The term “human capital,” seldom mentioned in economics before the 1950s, increased in usage starting in the 1960s. By the early 2000s, about 20% of all books concerned with economics mentioned the phrase human capital. In the early 1980s, about 15% of NBER working papers referenced human capital whereas just 6% of all economics articles did. Today the figure for the NBER exceeds 25% and is 20% among all economics articles. The concept of human capital is part of almost every field of economics. The NBER played an outsized role in the rise of the concept of human capital mainly because of its emphasis on empiricism. We explore how the NBER was an incubator of human capital research and the ways human capital theory transformed and broadened its research agenda.