Human capital investment processes in metropolitan labor markets: the case of the municipalities of Guadalajara, Tlaquepaque and Zapopan

Abstract

The last half century has allowed human capital theory to gain a deeper understanding of the personal characteristics that most influence the productivity level of economically active individuals. The optimizing rationality postulate of human capital theory facilitates the analysis of individual behavior in private decision making, emphasizing personal characteristics, such as earned income, schooling, potential work experience and gender, among others.
The comparative analysis of the Mincerian functions of personal income empirically reveals the pure and non-pure rates of return to school and post-school investment in different economic spaces. Likewise, the unequational econometric models of direct regression shed light on the degree of wage discrimination by gender in the labor markets of the Guadalajara metropolitan area, by analyzing the situation of the corresponding coefficients in three suburban municipalities: Guadalajara, Tlaquepaque and Zapopan.