TY - JOUR AU - Lang,Kevin TI - Does the Human-Capital/Educational-Sorting Debate Matter for Development Policy? JF - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series VL - No. 4052 PY - 1992 Y2 - April 1992 UR - http://www.nber.org/papers/w4052 L1 - http://www.nber.org/papers/w4052.pdf N1 - Author contact info: Kevin Lang Department of Economics Boston University 270 Bay State Road Boston, MA 02215 Tel: 617/353-5694 Fax: 617/353-4001 E-Mail: lang@bu.edu AB - If education increases human capital, subsidizing education can generate economic growth and combat poverty. Estimates of its return suggest that education is a good social investment. In sorting models, the return reflects in part the information about productivity revealed by the worker's education. Thus the social and private returns diverge. It might appear that if we believe the sorting model, we should be less swayed by evidence that estimated returns to education exceed the social discount rate, and therefore less likely to support education-based development policies. This conclusion is shown to be incorrect. ER -