The 37th General Conference of the International Association for Research on Income and Wealth

The study of Chernin, Gimpelson and Voskoboynikov “Is the experience of an employee important for the growth of the Russian economy?” is devoted to the general problem of the contribution of human capital to economic growth. The study is at the junction of two strands of research. The first is the dependence of wages on the age of the worker. Many studies have been conducted at the micro and macro levels for different countries. In recent years, researchers (see, for example, Lagakos et al. 2018) have proposed an approach to decompose two effects that affect the wages of an employee—the experience accumulation effect and the cohort effect, which shows the influence of the education and personal experience of workers of a certain generation. For Russia, this decomposition is especially interesting, since the Russian labor market includes groups of workers who began their careers before and after the transition to the market economy. The second strand is the decomposition of growth by the contributions of individual growth factors, the economic growth account. Research at the intersection of these two areas has just begun to appear, and the work presented is the first for a transitional economy that experienced shock therapy.

The preliminary results of the work characterizing growth for the period 2000–2019 show that in the Russian economy the cohort effect dominates, while the influence of experience is extremely limited. Another important result is the high sensitivity of the findings to the decomposition parameters—the assumptions about the depreciation of human capital and the number of years left until retirement, when the employee stops investing in their own human capital.