Abstract
Aggregate and average human capital per worker in each of the 50 United States are estimated using microdata from the Annual Demographic File (ADF) and outgoing Rotation Groups (ORG) of the Current Population Survey for 1976-2000 and 1979-2000, respectively, and are compared to one another and to recent estimates from Mulligan and Sala-i-Martin (1997, 2000). The growth-rate patterns produced substantial mixing in the state distribution of average human capital per worker and unconditional beta convergence. Aggregate human capital growth rates are dominated by workforce scale effects that strongly favor southern and western regions.
Highlights
Several approaches have been relied on to develop empirical estimates of human capital for use in growth and convergence studies
Annual state estimates of per worker and aggregate human capital based on multiple years of Annual Demographic File (ADF) and Outgoing Rotation Group (ORG) microdata samples from the Current Population Survey (CPS) are presented and compared to one another and to those developed by Mulligan and Sala-i-Martin (1997, 2000)
Consistent with what is well known for other measures of regional growth over this time period, the results presented in Table 7 show the dramatic differences in the growth of aggregate human capital in the south and west regions of the
Summary
Several approaches have been relied on to develop empirical estimates of human capital for use in growth and convergence studies. Mulligan and Sala-i-Martin (1997) use a truncated Mincerian approach that estimates the wages of (unskilled) workers with zero years of schooling as the constant term in a logwage equation that includes a linear schooling term. This estimate is used as a numeraire to compute the average human capital per worker as total labor earnings per capita divided by this numeraire. Annual state estimates of per worker and aggregate human capital based on multiple years of Annual Demographic File (ADF) and Outgoing Rotation Group (ORG) microdata samples from the CPS are presented and compared to one another and to those developed by Mulligan and Sala-i-Martin (1997, 2000).
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