The most-often stated reason the decline in average real weekly wages among production workers has been that technological advancements have resulted in increased demand for skilled workers, leaving less-skilled workers with fewer job opportunities. In this paper, David R. Howell examines this...

The improvement in the relative economic status of African-American Workers in the 1960's and 1970's was reversed in the 1980's, a decade that also featured a collapse in the relative (and real) wages of the last skilled (Bound and Freeman, 1992; Blau and Kahn, 1992; Levy and Murnane, 1992). At the same...

The sharp decline in real wages and the drop in relative earnings among low–skilled workers generally is attributed to structural shifts in the labor force induced by technological change that has limited the demand for workers with low skill levels. While the claim that the cause of reduced...

This paper assesses the empirical support for the skill mismatch story, outlines an institutionalist alternative, and contrasts their policy implications. The first part of the paper considers the empirical support for the underlying premise of the skill mismatch explanation for the earnings...