Human Capital and Financial Development: Firm-Level Interactions and Macroeconomic Implications

Capital-skill complementarity in production implies non-trivial interactions between the availability of human capital and financial constraints. Firms that are constrained in their access to finance hire a lower proportion of skilled workers than do unconstrained firms. Conversely, a lack of human capital increases skilled wages, reducing firms’ desired capital intensity and thus loosening firms’ effective financial constraints. To assess the macroeconomic implications of such firm-level interactions, we build an occupational-choice model with capital-skill complementarity in production, which we calibrate to US data. We vary financial frictions, educational attainment and total factor productivity across countries, and we quantify how aggregate output, wage inequality and entrepreneurship are affected by financial market liberalizations and increases in educational attainment. For aggregate output, the joint effect of both factors is, on average, 30% larger than the sum of the individual effects. Taking the educational attainment of the population as given, in countries with a negligible share of tertiary-educated workers and low total factor productivity, financial development has only small effects on aggregate output.