Measuring Skill Intensity of Occupations with Imperfect Substitutability Across Skill Types

Barbara Pertold-Gębicka

CERGE-EI Working Papers from The Center for Economic Research and Graduate Education - Economics Institute, Prague

Abstract: In absence of a model-based measure of occupational skill-intensity, the litera- ture on wage inequality cannot consistently track technological progress on occu- pational level - a key ingredient of recent theories of labor market polarization. In this paper, I use the March CPS data from 1983 to 2002 to estimate such a measure corresponding to occupation-specific relative productivities of college and high-school educated. With imperfect substitution across skill types, the measure- ment of relative productivities requires estimation of substitution elasticities, and I propose a simple strategy to obtain these. The resulting measure is used to shed light on the modified skill-biased technological change hypothesis proposed by Autor et al. (2006).

Keywords: occupations; skill-intensity; skill content; elasticity of labor substitu- tion; technological progress; polarization (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J24 J31 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2010-10
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-lab
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

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