Do Cognitive Test Scores Explain Higher U.S. Wage Inequality?

Francine Blau and Lawrence Kahn

The Review of Economics and Statistics, 2005, vol. 87, issue 1, 184-193

Abstract: Using microdata from the 1994-1998 International Adult Literacy Survey for nine countries, we examine the role of cognitive skills in explaining higher wage inequality in the United States. We find that while the greater dispersion of cognitive test scores in the United States plays a part in explaining higher U.S. wage inequality, higher labor market prices (i.e., higher returns to measured human capital and cognitive performance) and greater residual inequality still play important roles, and are, on average, quantitatively considerably more important than differences in the distribution of test scores in explaining higher U.S. wage inequality. © 2005 President and Fellows of Harvard College and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Date: 2005
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (115)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/0034653053327649 link to full text (application/pdf)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
Working Paper: Do Cognitive Test Scores Explain Higher U.S. Wage Inequality? (2004)
Working Paper: Do Cognitive Test Scores Explain Higher US Wage Inequality? (2001)
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:tpr:restat:v:87:y:2005:i:1:p:184-193

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://mitpressjour ... rnal/?issn=0034-6535

Access Statistics for this article

The Review of Economics and Statistics is currently edited by Pierre Azoulay, Olivier Coibion, Will Dobbie, Raymond Fisman, Benjamin R. Handel, Brian A. Jacob, Kareen Rozen, Xiaoxia Shi, Tavneet Suri and Yi Xu

More articles in The Review of Economics and Statistics from MIT Press
Bibliographic data for series maintained by The MIT Press ().