| Principal Author | Year | Information | Variables |
| Adam Smith | 1776 | Anticipates the definition of human capital: includes explicitly as part of the fixed capital of each nation, acquisition and maintenance of skills and knowledge that can be used to create wealth by workers. | Human Capital
Growth, creation of wealth of a nation |
| Jacob Mincer | 1958 | The influence of variables such as education and experience in determining differences in income among workers. | Education and Income |
| Arrow | 1962 | The production capacity of workers improved with experience at work. | Production capacity and work experience. |
| Gary Becker | 1964 | Human capital is a decision that involves many periods: some initial periods, which is done investment spending, and a subsequent, where profits are gathered. Thus, in the case of the company, the costs (expenses) of training are opposed to the higher future labor productivity (profits). | Human capital formation, investment spending and benefits. |
| Theodore Shultz | 1968 | Production factors crucial to improving the welfare of the poor are not space, energy and the availability of arable land; the decisive factors are the improvement of the quality of the population and advances in knowledge. | Improving the quality of the population, advances in knowledge |
| Spence | 1973 | Workers invest in education to send a signal to its best potential employers. For their part, employers link their wage offers to the level of education of workers precisely because high wage offer intended to ensure that workers self-select themselves: candidates who are more productive | Level of education and wage offer. |
| Edward Denison | 1979 | He was one of the pioneers in stop considering education as a commodity and start considering it as a form of capital | Education and Capital |
| Mushkin | 1980 | Who said to understand the importance of education as a factor in capital formation is useful to think of the analogy of how natural resources of a nation, can not by themselves without improvements lead end products with a high value
added. | Education and training Human Capital |
| Blaug | 1983 | Their study is done from the perspective of methodological individualism, that is, from the perspective of all social phenomena should be studied starting from its foundation in individual behavior. | Individualism and social phenomena. |
| Fermoso | 1997 | Education as an important factor in the formation of human capital, is conceived in two ways, as consumption and investment. | Human capital formation, consumption and investment |
| David O´connor | 2002 | Investment in Human Capital and economic openness associated technology.
Of all the factors considered individual talent is a key element when designing educational policies, because if the differences in education levels are due to differences in the talents of individuals, there is no reason, from the perspective of efficiency, to facilitate access to education | Investment in Human Capital, economic openness and technology |
| Checchi | 2006 | Of all the factors considered individual talent is a key element when designing educational policies, because if the differences in education levels are due to differences in the talents of individuals, there is no reason, from the perspective of efficiency, to facilitate access to education | Individual talent, education policies and access to education. |