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Decomposing the education wage gap: everything but the kitchen sink

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Abstract

This paper contributes to a large literature concerned with identifying the source of the widening wage gap between high school and college graduates by providing a comprehensive, multidimensional decomposition of wages across both time and educational status. Data from a multitude of sources are brought to bear on the question of the relative importance of labor market supply and demand factors in the determination of those wage differences. The results confirm the importance of investments in and use of technology, which has been the focus of most of the previous literature, but are also able to show that demand and supply factors played very different roles in the growing wage gaps of the 1980s and 1990s.

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  • Julie L. Hotchkiss & Menbere Shiferaw, 2010. "Decomposing the education wage gap: everything but the kitchen sink," FRB Atlanta Working Paper 2010-12, Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta.
    • Handle: RePEc:fip:fedawp:2010-12
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    Cited by:

    1. Viaene, Jean-Marie & Zilcha, Itzhak, 2013. "Public funding of higher education," Journal of Public Economics, Elsevier, vol. 108(C), pages 78-89.
    2. Barbara M. Fraumeni, 2015. "Choosing a Human Capital Measure: Educational Attainment Gaps and Rankings," NBER Working Papers 21283, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    3. Peter ven de Ven & Anne Harrison & Barbara Fraumeni & Barbara M. Fraumeni & Michael S. Christian & Jon D. Samuels, 2017. "The Accumulation of Human and Nonhuman Capital, Revisited," Review of Income and Wealth, International Association for Research in Income and Wealth, vol. 63, pages 381-410, December.
    4. Barbara M. Fraumeni & Michael S. Christian & Jon D. Samuels, 2015. "The Accumulation of Human and Nonhuman Capital, Revisited," NBER Working Papers 21284, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    5. Grinstein-Weiss, Michal & Sherraden, Michael & Gale, William G. & Rohe, William M. & Schreiner, Mark & Key, Clinton, 2013. "Long-term effects of Individual Development Accounts on postsecondary education: Follow-up evidence from a randomized experiment," Economics of Education Review, Elsevier, vol. 33(C), pages 58-68.
    6. Limor Hatsor & Itzhak Zilcha, 2021. "Subsidizing heterogeneous higher education systems," Journal of Public Economic Theory, Association for Public Economic Theory, vol. 23(2), pages 318-344, April.

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