Technology, Skill and the Wage Structure

Technology, Skill and the Wage Structure PDF Author: Nancy L. Stokey
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Skilled labor
Languages : en
Pages : 50

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Book Description
Technical change, even if it is limited in scope, can have employment, output, price and wage effects that ripple through the whole economy. This paper uses a flexible and tractable framework, with heterogeneous workers and technologies, and many tasks/goods, to analyze the general equilibrium effects of technical change for a limited set of tasks. Output increases and price falls for tasks that are directly affected. The effects on employment depend on the elasticity of substitution across tasks/goods. For high elasticities, employment expands to a group of more skilled workers. Hence for tasks farther up the technology ladder, employment falls, output declines, and prices and wages rise. For low elasticities, employment at affected tasks contracts among less skilled workers, as they shift to complementary tasks with unchanged technologies. In all cases, the output, price and wage changes are damped for more distant tasks, both above and below the affected group.

Technology, Skill and the Wage Structure

Technology, Skill and the Wage Structure PDF Author: Nancy L. Stokey
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Skilled labor
Languages : en
Pages : 50

Get Book Here

Book Description
Technical change, even if it is limited in scope, can have employment, output, price and wage effects that ripple through the whole economy. This paper uses a flexible and tractable framework, with heterogeneous workers and technologies, and many tasks/goods, to analyze the general equilibrium effects of technical change for a limited set of tasks. Output increases and price falls for tasks that are directly affected. The effects on employment depend on the elasticity of substitution across tasks/goods. For high elasticities, employment expands to a group of more skilled workers. Hence for tasks farther up the technology ladder, employment falls, output declines, and prices and wages rise. For low elasticities, employment at affected tasks contracts among less skilled workers, as they shift to complementary tasks with unchanged technologies. In all cases, the output, price and wage changes are damped for more distant tasks, both above and below the affected group.

Technology, Computers, and Wages

Technology, Computers, and Wages PDF Author: Chris N. Sakellariou
Publisher: World Bank Publications
ISBN:
Category : Computer users
Languages : en
Pages : 32

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Book Description
Increasing returns to schooling and rising inequality are well documented for industrial countries and for some developing countries. The growing demand for skills is associated with recent technological developments. The authors argue that computers in the workplace represent one manifestation of these changes. Research in the United States and industrial countries documents a premium for computer use. But there is recent evidence suggesting that computer skills by themselves do not command a wage premium. The authors review the literature and use data from a survey of higher education graduates in Vietnam. The results support the unobserved heterogeneity explanation for computer wage premiums. They suggest that computers may make the productive workers even more productive. However, given the scarcity of computers in low-income countries, an operational strategy of increasing computer availability and skills would seem to offer considerable hope for increasing the incomes of the poor.

The Origins of Technology-skill Complementarity

The Origins of Technology-skill Complementarity PDF Author: Lawrence F. Katz
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 29

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Book Description
Current concern with relationships among particular technologies, capital, and the wage structure motivates this study of the origins of technology-skill complementarity in manufacturing. We offer evidence of the existence of technology-skill and capital-skill (relative) complementarities from 1909 to 1929, and suggest that they were associated with continuous-process and batch methods and the adoption of electric motors. Industries that used more capital per worker and a greater proportion of their horsepower in the form of purchased electricity employed relatively more educated blue-collar workers in 1940 and paid their blue-collar workers substantially more from 1909 to 1929. We also infer capital-skill complementarity using the wage-bill for non-production workers and find that the relationship was as large from 1909-19 as it has been recently. Finally, we link our findings to those on the high-school movement (1910 to 1940). The rapid increase in the supply of skills from 1910 to 1940 may have prevented rising inequality with technological change

Technology and Changes in Skill Structure

Technology and Changes in Skill Structure PDF Author: Stephen Machin
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 56

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Book Description


The Race between Education and Technology

The Race between Education and Technology PDF Author: Claudia Goldin
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674037731
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 497

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Book Description
This book provides a careful historical analysis of the co-evolution of educational attainment and the wage structure in the United States through the twentieth century. The authors propose that the twentieth century was not only the American Century but also the Human Capital Century. That is, the American educational system is what made America the richest nation in the world. Its educational system had always been less elite than that of most European nations. By 1900 the U.S. had begun to educate its masses at the secondary level, not just in the primary schools that had remarkable success in the nineteenth century. The book argues that technological change, education, and inequality have been involved in a kind of race. During the first eight decades of the twentieth century, the increase of educated workers was higher than the demand for them. This had the effect of boosting income for most people and lowering inequality. However, the reverse has been true since about 1980. This educational slowdown was accompanied by rising inequality. The authors discuss the complex reasons for this, and what might be done to ameliorate it.

Technology, Trade, and Wages

Technology, Trade, and Wages PDF Author: James Dutton Adams
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : International trade
Languages : en
Pages : 46

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Book Description
eal wages.

Technology and the Wage Structure

Technology and the Wage Structure PDF Author: Lawrence Mishel
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
This paper assesses the role of technology in generating the growth of wage inequality in the 1980s and 1990s. Much of the existing literature fails to adequately address this issue for two reasons. First, most of the literature fails to examine whether technology's impact on skill demands was greater in the 1980s and 1990s than in the 1970s, which we refer to as the question of acceleration. Since technology is complementary with skill in any given time period, the question which must be answered is whether technology's impact on wage inequality was greater in the 1980s or 1990s relative to earlier periods, i.e., is there evidence of acceleration? Second, the literature fails to adequately address the trends in within-group wage inequality or overall wage inequality; rather, the focus is on the narrower question of skill and education differentials. Also, there has been little examination of employment and wage trends in the 1990s, an important omission since these trends tend not to be consistent with a technology story. We present estimates of technology's impact which incorporate changes in skill-technology complementarities as well as the pace of technological change. Our results show no acceleration of demand for education relative to the 1970s, casting doubt on the technology explanation of growing education differentials and wage inequality. Using an even broader measure of skill (employment by wage levels) we find technology's impact more, not less, favorable on low- and middle-wage men in the post-1979 period. Technology's impact on women workers also does not fit the conventional technology story. Last, there is evidence that technology's skill bias may be neutral in the 1990s.

Understanding the Technology of Computer Technology Diffusion

Understanding the Technology of Computer Technology Diffusion PDF Author: Lex Borghans
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Computers
Languages : en
Pages : 58

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Book Description


Inequality and the Labor Market

Inequality and the Labor Market PDF Author: Sharon Block
Publisher: Brookings Institution Press
ISBN: 0815738811
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 263

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Book Description
Exploring a new agenda to improve outcomes for American workers As the United States continues to struggle with the impact of the devastating COVID-19 recession, policymakers have an opportunity to redress the competition problems in our labor markets. Making the right policy choices, however, requires a deep understanding of long-term, multidimensional problems. That will be solved only by looking to the failures and unrealized opportunities in anti-trust and labor law. For decades, competition in the U.S. labor market has declined, with the result that American workers have experienced slow wage growth and diminishing job quality. While sluggish productivity growth, rising globalization, and declining union representation are traditionally cited as factors for this historic imbalance in economic power, weak competition in the labor market is increasingly being recognized as a factor as well. This book by noted experts frames the legal and economic consequences of this imbalance and presents a series of urgently needed reforms of both labor and anti-trust laws to improve outcomes for American workers. These include higher wages, safer workplaces, increased ability to report labor violations, greater mobility, more opportunities for workers to build power, and overall better labor protections. Inequality in the Labor Market will interest anyone who cares about building a progressive economic agenda or who has a marked interest in labor policy. It also will appeal to anyone hoping to influence or anticipate the much-needed progressive agenda for the United States. The book's unusual scope provides prescriptions that, as Nobel Laureate Joseph Stiglitz notes in the introduction, map a path for rebalancing power, not just in our economy but in our democracy.

Technology and Changes in Skill Structure

Technology and Changes in Skill Structure PDF Author: Stephen Machin
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Ajuste estructural
Languages : en
Pages : 58

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Book Description