Authors:

  • Claudia Goldin
  • Lawrence Katz

Excerpt

January 11, 2020, Paper, "The race between education and technology provides a canonical framework that does an excellent 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 backwards and forwards. 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." 


Non-HKS Author Website - Claudia Goldin

Non-HKS Author Website - Lawrence Katz