| China is at the critical stage for achieving the high-quality development transformation but facing severe challenges due to the declines in the general labor resource endowment advantage,the human capital gap and economic development gap across regions.This study tries to find the efficient solutions from the angle of aggregate human capital measurement,and also has a micro investigation of future human capital development.This study mainly develops the frontier human capital measurement method called “ Generalized Division of Labor”(GDL),constructs the generalized human capital measurement index system with higher accuracy for China,and reexamines the human capital development,distribution and contribution to regional income difference based on this newly constructed index system.Besides,in view of the important role of skilled labor in aggregate human capital development and the childhood being critical stage for individual' s ability development,this study also examines the impact of parenting style on childhood human capital development at the micro level in order to explore how to foster the future human capital sustainability development with declining labor resource.Firstly,the paper provides an in-depth theoretical analysis of the GDL method.It shows that the key elements and challenges in aggregate human capital measurement are about the unobserved labor quality at the individual level and the aggregation of labor with different skill levels at the macro level.Traditional measurement methods treat the labor at different skill levels as perfect substitutes and only simply use linear aggregation,which leads to the failure of these methods in measuring the human capital intensive increase due to the skill imperfect substitution.The GDL method improves the measurement with a highly flexible and practicable aggregation model without any restriction on the skill substitutability.Following neoclassical economics assumptions,the unobserved elements in the transformed GDL calculation function only include the base-skill group labor quality and the elasticity of substitution between the skilled labor aggregator and the base-skill labor.Secondly,since the elasticity of substitution between the skilled labor human capital aggregator and the base-skill labor human capital is critical for the aggregation of the generalized human capital,this study builds the empirical model by introducing the GDL calculation function into the Cobb-Douglas production function and then estimates the elasticity of substitution using provincial panel data from 1985 to 2016,and further considers the regional and dynamic technology development disparity.Thus,it obtains the long-term,regional,and dynamic skill elasticity estimated value.The results are lower in more developed regions and at more developed stages.It suggests that the skilled labor human capital is becoming more and more important in China and harder to be substituted,and it also shows the improvement of GDL method by incorporating the intensive human capital due to the skill imperfect substitution.Thirdly,the paper constructs the generalized human capital index system of China from 1985 to 2016 at the national,regional and provincial level using the estimated elasticity value above,shows the development of national generalized human capital in China and analyzes the impact of intensive human capital changes due to skill substitution on human capital measurement accuracy by comparing the generalized human capital with the efficiency units,and further analyzes the distribution pattern of generalized human capital across provinces and across regions.It finds the total generalized human capital and the corresponding per worker value in China increased substantially from 1985 to 2016 and the intensive human capital changes play an important role compared with the efficiency units.At the same time,it shows that there exists evident difference in the measurement results when using the three results of the skill substitution elasticity since each one shows different dimensions of the intensive human capital changes.Moreover,it suggests that the provincial and regional generalized human capital per worker is the highest in the east region,but lower in other regions,especially the west region,and the gap is being enlarged along with time,where the intensive human capital changes also matter.Fourthly,the paper starts from the difference in the human capital measurement of generalized human capital,efficiency units,J-F human capital and average education years and then compares the difference in the human capital contribution to provincial income per worker difference by these indexes in development accounting.At first,the generalized human capital could reflect the provincial human capital gap and its dynamic changes more accurately since it could measure the comprehensive human capital at the individual level using relative wage with macro factors differenced out and incorporate the intensive changes of human capital due to skill substitutability.Then,according to the covariance-variance development accounting,the contribution of human capital to the total provincial variance based on generalized human capital is higher than the results based on either efficiency units or average education years,but lower than the J-F human capital.When using the generalized human capital,the corresponding TFP contribution suggests that both TFP and human capital are important factors to explain the difference in provincial development in China.But the results when using the other three indexes are biased.Moreover,when using different development accounting methods,the pattern of the difference in human capital contribution when using generalized human capital and those when using the other three indexes are generally consistent with the results in covariance-variance method.Fifthly,this study further considers the measurement of labor quality in generalized human capital index system with an introduction of the base-skill labor quality measurement.Since the base-skill labor quality is higher in the east and northeast regions,the variance of provincial generalized human capital and the gap between the middle,west regions and the east region are enlarged.The contribution of the generalized human capital to the provincial income difference also increases correspondingly.Lastly,as an exploration of the efficient development of the human capital quality,the paper introduces the principal caregiver ' s parenting style as direct family investment into the value-added production function of the cognitive skill and empirically studies the impact of the parenting style on the individual' s cognitive skill development in the childhood using CFPS 2014 data.The OLS basic results suggest that both of the return and the mechanism of different types of parenting style are different.In particular,when using the authoritarian parenting style as the reference type,both authoritative and permissive parenting style could significantly improve the comprehensive cognitive score,however,the impact of the neglectful type is insignificant.The child' s time investment is the common important mechanism of the authoritative and permissive parenting style,child' s intrinsic motivation and expectation for high education are another two potential channels for the authoritative type,but the mechanism of the permissive one is more complex.Moreover,this paper conducts the robustness test by analyzing the stability of parenting style type,measuring the parenting styles and the cognitive skill results in different methods and using different empirical methods including 2SLS and GMM. |
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