Two recent papers, Neal (1995) and Parent (2000) have presented evidence in favour of the importance of industry specific human capital. The authors argued that some or all of the previous evidence on firm specific capital may in fact have been spurious, due to a correlation between firm and...

This paper uses information from the Dictionary of Occupational Titles (DOT) and Displaced Worker Surveys (DWS) to provide evidence on the source of human capital specificity. Measures of four basic skills are constructed from the detailed DOT information. These measures are used to...