TY  - JOUR
AU  - Huggett,Mark
AU  - Kaplan,Greg
TI  - The Money Value of a Man
JF  - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series
VL  - No. 18066
PY  - 2012
Y2  - May 2012
UR  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w18066
L1  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w18066.pdf
N1  - Author contact info:
Mark Huggett
Georgetown University
E-Mail: mh5@georgetown.edu

Greg Kaplan
Department of Economics
Princeton University
Fisher Hall
Princeton, NJ 08544
Tel: 609/258-4000
Fax: 609/258-6419
E-Mail: gkaplan@princeton.edu
AB  - This paper posits a notion of the value of an individual's human capital and the associated return on human capital. These concepts are examined using U.S. data on male earnings and financial asset returns. We find that (1) the value of human capital is far below the value implied by discounting earnings at the risk-free rate, (2) mean human capital returns exceed stock returns early in life and decline with age, (3) the stock component of the value of human capital is smaller than the bond component at all ages and (4) human capital returns and stock returns have a small positive correlation over the working lifetime.
ER  -