Title
Skill Biased Structural Change
Author(s)
Francisco J. Buera Francisco Buera (Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago)
Joseph P. Kaboski Joseph Kaboski (University of Notre Dame)
Richard Rogerson Richard Rogerson (Princeton University)
Abstract
We document for a broad panel of advanced economies that increases in GDP per capita are associated with a shift in the composition of value added to sectors that are intensive in high-skill labor. It follows that further development in these economies leads to an increase in the relative demand for skilled labor. We develop a two-sector model of this process and use it to assess the contribution of this process of skill-biased structural change to the rise of the skill premium in the US, and a broad panel of advanced economies, over the period 1977 to 2005. We find that these compositional demands account for between 25 and 30% of the overall increase of the skill premium due to technical change.
Creation Date
2015-05
Section URL ID
Paper Number
2015-6
URL
https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w21165/w21165.pdf
File Function
Jel
E02, J20
Keyword(s)
Skill-based Structural Change, Labor
Suppress
false
Series
13