As one of the most important economic development stimuli, human capital has received great attention from many researchers. Accordingly, it is necessary to discover effective factors and the sign of their impact on human capital, particularly in Iran. Therefore, the purpose of the extant study was to examine the impact of globalization and economic sanction on the human capital of Iran for the period of 1989-2019. In this case, the effect of economic sanctions on the human capital of Iran was investigated as an innovative aspect of the present paper. The research model was designed by using independent variables, including the KOF Globalization Index, dummy variable of economic sanctions, economic growth rate, and urban population rate, and the dependent variable of average years of education as human capital. Finally, Autoregressive Distributed Lag (ARDL) method was employed to estimate the research model. The results indicated a positive impact of globalization, economic sanctions, economic growth rate, and urban population rate on the average years of education that served as the human capital index. Manuscript profile