Human Capital in the United States from 1975 to 2000: Patterns of Growth and Utilization

This study enhances the existing measures of the nation's human capital and the extent to which that capital is utilized. Haveman, Bershadker, and Schwabish develop an indicator of the value of the human capital stock held by the nation's working-age population called Earnings Capacity (EC) , and use it to study the time trends in aggregate human capital in the United States and human capital per worker. They also use EC to evaluate utilization of the nation's human capital stock, thereby demonstrating the usefulness of the EC indicator in measuring the size and strength of the U.S. economy. The authors then explore these patterns for the entire working-age population as well as for at-risk subgroups distinguished by race, schooling, and age in order to highlight the social and public policy relevance of the EC indicator. Overall, their empirical results provide insights into the performance of the U.S. economy over the past three decades, and they serve to supplement other analyses of this performance.