A Note on Human Capital v. Screening: Evidence from Sportometrics

Much work has been written on the returns to heterogeneous labor inputs in the market, especially from a human capital perspective. Important among these is Becker |Human Capital, 1975~ and Wise |AER, 1975~. They point out that individuals make investments in themselves through educational attainment and post-school job investments in order to recoup greater nominal returns in the labor market. Challenges to the human capital notion have come from Lazear |AER, 1977~ and Spence |QJE, 1973~ in the form of screening, where education is a signal to employers to select the more talented for jobs which involve considerable on-the-job training.