Extending the Race between Education and Technology
AEA Papers and Proceedings
vol. 110,
May 2020
(pp. 347-51)
Abstract
The race between education and technology provides a canonical framework that does a remarkable job of explaining US wage structure changes across the twentieth century. The framework involves secular increases in the demand for more-educated workers from skill-biased technological change, combined with variations in the supply of skills from changes in educational access. We expand the analysis backward and forward. The framework helps explain rising skill differentials in the nineteenth and twenty-first centuries but needs to be augmented to illuminate the recent convexification of education returns and implied slowdown in the growth of the relative demand for college workers.Citation
Autor, David, Claudia Goldin, and Lawrence F. Katz. 2020. "Extending the Race between Education and Technology." AEA Papers and Proceedings, 110: 347-51. DOI: 10.1257/pandp.20201061Additional Materials
JEL Classification
- I26 Returns to Education
- J23 Labor Demand
- J24 Human Capital; Skills; Occupational Choice; Labor Productivity
- J31 Wage Level and Structure; Wage Differentials
- N31 Economic History: Labor and Consumers, Demography, Education, Health, Welfare, Income, Wealth, Religion, and Philanthropy: U.S.; Canada: Pre-1913
- N32 Economic History: Labor and Consumers, Demography, Education, Health, Welfare, Income, Wealth, Religion, and Philanthropy: U.S.; Canada: 1913-