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The Payoff to Skill in the Third Industrial Revolution*
| Content Provider | Semantic Scholar |
|---|---|
| Author | Liu, Yujia Grusky, David Jackson, Michelle Snipp, C. Matthew Owens, Lindsay Bird, Beth Red Wimer, Christopher |
| Copyright Year | 2011 |
| Abstract | We develop a new approach to analyzing earnings and earnings inequality in the United States that rests on a comprehensive measurement of skill. The simple model based on this approach, which we apply to the 1979-2010 Current Population Surveys, allows us to adjudicate between competing accounts of the changing returns to cognitive, creative, technical, and social skill. We find that the recent takeoff in between-occupation inequality can be fully explained when such skills are taken into account. We also find that the returns to schooling, which have long been understood to be rapidly increasing, are in fact quite stable and have appeared to increase in conventional models only because correlated changes in workplace skills have not been parsed out. The most important trend under this specification is a precipitous increase in the wage payoff to “analytic skills” that entail synthesis, critical thinking, and deductive and inductive reasoning. The payoff to technical and creative skills, which are typically featured in discussions of the third industrial revolution, have been oversold and don’t compare to this payoff to analysis. We conclude by suggesting that such skill-biased trends are driven more by institutional change than technical change. |
| File Format | PDF HTM / HTML |
| Alternate Webpage(s) | http://www.sofi.su.se/polopoly_fs/1.65119.1323949644!/David_Grusky_20111208.pdf |
| Language | English |
| Access Restriction | Open |
| Content Type | Text |
| Resource Type | Article |
