Description: Human Capital and Institutions is concerned with human capital in its many dimensions and brings to fore the role of political, social, and economic institutions in human capital formation and economic growth. Written by leading economic historians, including pioneers in historical research on human capital, the chapters in this text offer a broad-based view of human capital in economic development. The issues they address range from nutrition in pre-modern societies to twentieth-century advances in medical care; from the social institutions that provided temporary relief to workers in the middle and lower ranges of the wage scale to the factors that affected the performance of those who reached the pinnacle in business and art; and from political systems that stifled the advance of literacy to those that promoted public and higher education. Just as human capital has been a key to economic growth, so has the emergence of appropriate institutions been a key to the growth of human capital.
Brief description: Frank D. Lewis is Professor of Economics at Queen's University, Kingston, Canada. He has written on historical issues involving agriculture, land settlement, transportation, Native American history, war, and slavery. His work has appeared in a variety of publications that include leading economic history and economics journals. Articles on the North American fur trade of the eighteenth century (with Ann Carlos) have been awarded prizes by the Canadian Economic Association and the Library Company of Philadelphia. Some of his more recent papers have appeared in the Economic History Review, the Journal of Economic History, and Explorations in Economic History.