The Love Aspects of Human Capital and the Economic Activity of Countries

MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany

Abstract: The influence of non-economic factors and forces on economic activities and their outcomes is undeniable. Love, being so central to many human activities, should similarly have some effects on the economic activity of nations. This paper (a) builds a simple but innovative model, (b) imposes it on a limited data set to estimate the effects of love experience and feeling on the economic activity of a group of 133 countries, and (3) compares such effects to those of other determinants of the economic activity, including Barro-Lee human capital, openness, and physical capital, as well as a broad measure of national well-being, HDI. The results strongly favor physical capital followed, by HDI and Barro-Lee human capital. Although small in magnitude, love effects are more statistically significant than those of openness. There appears to be some multicollinearity and model functional issues which challenge the robustness of the estimates and call for further research. However, the technical efficiency of the estimates is reasonable, so that one may conclude that love is important, but not critical to economic activity. The policy implications call for more investment in physical capital, schooling, and in the overall improvement of human development than in love experience and feeling, even though those are important too.

Keywords: Love capital; Barro-Lee human capital; Mincer human capital formula; economic activity (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C21 C51 I0 J12 O15 O47 Z13 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2013-12-05
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-hap and nep-hrm
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/52686/1/MPRA_paper_52686.pdf original version (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:pra:mprapa:52686

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany Ludwigstraße 33, D-80539 Munich, Germany. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Joachim Winter ().