 Cyclical Skill-Biased Technological ChangeThijs van Rens and Almut Balleer No 62, 2007 Meeting Papers from Society for Economic Dynamics Abstract: Over the past two decades, technological progress has been biased towards making skilled labor more productive. The evidence for this finding is based on the persistent increase in the skill premium, parallel to an upward trend in the supply of skilled workers. What are the cyclical implications of skill-biased improvements in technology? To answer this question, we use the CPS outgoing rotation groups to construct quarterly series for the skill premium and the relative employment of skilled labor. The unconditional correlation of the skill premium with the cycle is zero. However, using a structural VAR with long run restrictions, we find that technology shocks substantially increase the price of skill. However, contrary to the conventional wisdom of capital-skill complementarity, we find that this effect is not driven by investment-specific shocks. Our results also suggest that total employment decreases only in response to skill-biased technology shocks, which we identify using a combination of short run and long run restrictions, and not in response to neutral technology shocks. Date: 2007 There are no downloads for this item, see the EconPapers FAQ for hints about obtaining it. Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:red:sed007:62 Access Statistics for this paper More papers in 2007 Meeting Papers from Society for Economic Dynamics Society for Economic Dynamics Marina Azzimonti Department of Economics Stonybrook University 10 Nicolls Road Stonybrook NY 11790 USA. Contact information at EDIRC. |
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