Human Capital Accounting in the United States: Context, Measurement, and Application

This study updates Christian's (2010) human capital account for the United States to the year 2009, refining the underlying data and putting the account into international context by reviewing applications in the rest of the world. It also measures the sensitivity of human capital measures to alternative assumptions about income growth rates, discount rates, the treatment of taxes, smoothing and imputation of labor force and school enrollment data, and the valuation of non-market time. It concludes with an application to the measurement of the output of the education sector.