We argue that a sensible measure of the aggregate value of human capital is the ratio of total labour income per capita to the wage of a person with zero years of schooling. The reason is that total labour income not only incorporates human capital, but also physical capital: given human...

We construct a set of human capital indexes for the states of the United States for each Census year starting in 1940. To do so we propose a new methodology for the construction of index numbers in panel data sets. Our method is based on an optimal approach by which we choose the `best' set...