Skill Prices, Occupations and Changes in the Wage Structure

Chris Taber and Nicolas Roys
Additional contact information
Chris Taber: Northwestern University

No 208, 2017 Meeting Papers from Society for Economic Dynamics

Abstract: This paper proposes and estimates a model of occupational choice with time-varying skills prices and heterogeneous human capital to understand the evolution of the wage structure since 1979. A worker’s multi-dimensional skills are exploited differently across different occupations. We allow for a rich specification of technological change which has heterogenous effects on different occupations and different parts of the skill distribution. We estimate the model combining three datasets: (1) O’NET, to measure skill intensity across occupations, (2) NLSY, to identify life-cycle supply effects, and (3) CPS, to estimate the role of technology. The return to inter-personal skills has steadily increased while the returns to cognitive and physical skills have declined. The rise of wage inequality is driven by technological change that favors high-skilled’ individual within occupation. The rise of services and the decline of manual occupations cannot be understood with a competitive labor market model.

Date: 2017
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-dge
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (7)

Downloads: (external link)
https://red-files-public.s3.amazonaws.com/meetpapers/2017/paper_208.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
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:red:sed017:208

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in 2017 Meeting Papers from Society for Economic Dynamics Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Christian Zimmermann ().