Showing 1 - 10 of 16
Average schooling in US states is highly correlated with state wage levels, even after controlling for the direct effect of schooling on individual wages. We use an instrumental variables strategy to determine whether this relationship is driven by social returns to education. The instrumentals...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10005828475
In the standard model of human capital with perfect labor markets general training. When labor market frictions compress the structure of wages in the general skills of their employees. The reason is that the distortion in the wage structure" turn technologically' general skills into specific'...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10005829349
We examine changes in the characteristics of American youth between the late 1970s and the late 1990s, with a focus on characteristics that matter for labor market success. We reweight the NLSY79 to look like the NLSY97 along a number of dimensions that are related to labor market success,...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10005829509
We provide a test for statistical discrimination or rational stereotyping in in environments in which agents learn over time. Our application is to the labor market. If profit maximizing firms have limited information about the general productivity of new workers, they may choose to use easily...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10005829605
This paper offers a model where firms decide what types of jobs to create and then search for suitable workers. When there are few skilled workers and the productivity gap between the skilled and the unskilled is small, firms create a single type of job and recruit all workers. An increase in...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10005829909
Becker's theory of human capital predicts that minimum wages should reduce training investments for affected workers, because they prevent these workers from taking wage cuts necessary to finance training. We show that when the assumption of perfectly competitive labor markets underlying this...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10005829980
This essay discusses the effect of technical change on wage inequality. I argue that the behavior of wages and returns to schooling indicates that technical change has been skill-biased during the past sixty years. Furthermore, the recent increase in inequality is most likely due to an...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10005830793
Goldin and Katz's <i>The Race between Education and Technology</i> is a monumental achievement that supplies a unified framework for interpreting how the demand and supply of human capital have shaped the distribution of earnings in the U.S. labor market over the 20th century. This essay reviews the...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10009652861
We analyze the early labor market outcomes of U.S. college graduates from the classes of 1974 to 2011, as a function of the economic conditions into which they graduated. We have three main findings. First, poor labor market conditions substantially disrupt early careers. A large recession at...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10010969263
This paper revisits the important ideas proposed by Atkinson and Stiglitz's seminal 1969 paper on technological change. After linking these ideas to the induced innovation literature of the 1960s and the more recent directed technological change literature, it explains how these three...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10011262792