This paper investigates the relationship between earnings, schooling, and ability for young men and women who entered the labor force during the late 60s and 70s. The emphasis is on controlling for both observed and unobserved family characteristics, extending a framework developed earlier by...

This paper investigates the shift in demand towards skilled labor in U.S. manufacturing. Between 1979 and 1989. employment of production workers in manufacturing dropped by 2.2 mil1ion or 15 percent while employment of non-production workers rose by 3 percent. A decomposition of changing...

This paper describes the construction of a large panel data set covering about 2600 firms in the U.S. manufacturing sector for up to twenty years which contains annual data on financial variables, employment, research and development expenditures, and aggregate patent applications. This data set...

This paper investigates the shift in demand away from unskilled and toward skilled labor in U.S. manufacturing over the 1980s. Production labor-saving technological change is the chief explanation for this shift. That conclusion is based on three facts: (1) the shift is due mostly to increased...