Christian Groth publishes article in Mathematical Social Sciences

"On aggregating human capital across heterogeneous cohorts"

This paper studies the question: Can the microeconomic Mincerian (log-linear) functional relationship between human capital, years of schooling and work experience be recovered in some similar form at the macroeconomic level? A large macroeconomic literature assumes so, warranting that the question is of interest. We first examine the question at a theoretical level and find that except under very special assumptions, the answer is in the negative. On the other hand, we also show numerically that a macro-Mincer relationship can nevertheless be perceived as a quantitatively reasonable approximation of the theoretically derived ‘‘true’’ relationship, at least if the observed heterogeneity comes only from differences in the number of years of schooling, retirement age, or demographic survival laws. The paper is joint work with Jakub Growiec, Warsaw School of Economics, Department of Quantitative Economics.

In: Mathematical Social Sciences, vol. 78, 2015, 21-38. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.mathsocsci.2015.09.003