Wage Dispersion in the 1980s: Resurrecting the Role of Trade Through the Effects of Durable Employment Changes
36 Pages Posted: 15 Feb 2006
Date Written: August 1995
Abstract
This paper finds that changes in durable manufacturing employment and investment in computer equipment can explain rising wage dispersion in the United States, measured in terms of the education premium. Reduced employment opportunities in durables production drive down the average wage for workers with only a high school education, thereby increasing the wage premium for college education. An innovation in this paper is the inclusion of investment in equipment as a proxy for skill-biased technical change. The rise in the technical skill premium could alone explain all of the rise in the college premium since 1979 were there no offsetting effects.
JEL Classification: J30, J31
Suggested Citation: Suggested Citation
Do you have a job opening that you would like to promote on SSRN?
Paper statistics
Recommended Papers
-
Income Distribution and Poverty in Selected OECD Countries
By Jean-marc Burniaux, Thai-thanh Dang, ...
-
Trends and Driving Factors in Income Distribution and Poverty in the OECD Area
-
Income Distribution and Poverty in OECD Countries in the Second Half of the 1990s
-
Poor People in Rich Nations: The United States in Comparative Perspective
-
The Distributional Impact of Social Transfers in the European Union: Evidence from the Echp
By Christopher Heady, Theodore Mitrakos, ...
-
Relative or Absolute Poverty in the US and EU? The Battle of the Rates
By Geranda Notten and Chris De Neubourg
-
Income Distribution and Social Security in an OECD Perspective
By Koen Caminada and Kees Goudswaard
-
The Australian System of Social Protection – An Overview (Second Edition)
By Peter Whiteford and Gregory Angenent
