If You Use a Screen Reader
This content is available through Read Online (Free) program, which relies on page scans. Since scans are not currently available to screen readers, please contact JSTOR User Support for access. We'll provide a PDF copy for your screen reader.
Journal Article
The Changing Roles of Education and Ability in Wage Determination
Gonzalo Castex and Evgenia Kogan Dechter
Journal of Labor Economics
Vol. 32, No. 4 (October 2014), pp. 685-710
Published
by: The University of Chicago Press on behalf of the Society of Labor Economists and the NORC at the University of Chicago
DOI: 10.1086/676018
https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/676018
Page Count: 26
You can always find the topics here!
Topics: Men, Thinking skills, Human capital, Educational outcomes, Test scores, Labor markets, Cognition, Coefficients, Productivity
Were these topics helpful?
Select the topics that are inaccurate.
Since scans are not currently available to screen readers, please contact JSTOR User Support for access. We'll provide a PDF copy for your screen reader.
Abstract
This study examines changes in returns to formal education and cognitive skills over the past 20 years using the 1979 and 1997 waves of the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth. We show that cognitive skills had a 30%–50% larger effect on wages in the 1980s than in the 2000s. Returns to education were higher in the 2000s. These developments are not explained by changing distributions of workers’ observable characteristics or by changing labor market structure. We show that the decline in returns to ability can be attributed to differences in the growth rate of technology between the 1980s and 2000s.
© 2014 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved.