Extending the Race between Education and Technology

David Autor, Claudia Goldin and Lawrence Katz

No 26705, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: The race between education and technology provides a canonical framework that does an excellent job of explaining U.S. wage structure changes across the twentieth century. The framework involves secular increases in the demand for more-educated workers from skill-biased technological change, combined with variations in the supply of skills from changes in educational access. We expand the analysis backwards and forwards. The framework helps explain rising skill differentials in the nineteenth and twenty-first centuries, but needs to be augmented to illuminate the recent convexification of education returns and implied slowdown in the growth of the relative demand for college workers. Increased educational wage differentials explain 75 percent of the rise of U.S. wage inequality from 1980 to 2000 as compared to 38 percent for 2000 to 2017.

JEL-codes: J2 J31 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020-01
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-edu, nep-ino and nep-ltv
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Published as David Autor & Claudia Goldin & Lawrence F. Katz, 2020. "Extending the Race between Education and Technology," AEA Papers and Proceedings, vol 110, pages 347-351.

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