Volume 17, Number 1 (Winter) 1982
Carliner, Geoffrey. 1982. "The Wages of Older Men." Journal of Human Resources 17(1):25-38.
In this paper, net depreciation rates in human capital are estimated from wage data on a longitudinal sample of men aged 45 to 64. The results indicate that wage rates begin to decline in the early fifties at rates under 1 percent annually and decline at about 2 percent annually after age 60. This decrease was offset by the general increase in wage levels so that on average the real wages of men approaching retirement did not decline during the period studied. The general increase was larger for blacks than for whites, probably because of decreases in labor market discrimination between 1966 and 1974. An appendix presents a GLS estimator for a variance components model in which the number of observations per individual varies.
The author is Senior Staff Economist, Council of Economic Advisers.
* This research was supported by a grant from the U.S. Department of Labor. The
author would like to thank Dorothy Worth for programming and Glenn MacDonald and
the editor of this Journal for helpful comments on earlier drafts.
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