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Reassessing the Trends in the Relative Supply of College-Equivalent Workers in the U.S.: A Selection-Correction Approach

Author

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  • Elitas, Zeynep
  • Ercan, Hakan
  • Tumen, Semih
Abstract
Among better-educated employed men, the fraction of full-time full-year (FTFY) workers is quite high and stable -- around 90 percent -- over time in the U.S. Among those with lower education levels, however, this fraction is much lower and considerably more volatile, moving within the range of 62-82 percent for high school dropouts and 75-88 percent for high school graduates. These observations suggest that the composition of unobserved skills may be subject to sharp movements within low-educated employed workers, while the scale of these movements is potentially much smaller within high-educated ones. The standard college-premium framework accounts for the observed shifts between education categories, but it cannot account for unobserved compositional changes within education categories. Our paper uses Heckman's two-step estimator on repeated Current Population Survey cross sections to calculate a relative supply series that corrects for unobserved compositional shifts due to selection into and out of the FTFY status. We find that the well-documented deceleration in the growth rate of relative supply of college-equivalent workers after mid-1980s becomes even more pronounced once we correct for selectivity. This casts further doubt on the relevance of the plain skill-biased technical change (SBTC) hypothesis. We conclude that what happens to the within-group unobserved skill composition for low-educated groups is critical for fully understanding the trends in the relative supply of college workers in the United States. We provide several interpretations to our selection-corrected estimates.

Suggested Citation

  • Elitas, Zeynep & Ercan, Hakan & Tumen, Semih, 2014. "Reassessing the Trends in the Relative Supply of College-Equivalent Workers in the U.S.: A Selection-Correction Approach," MPRA Paper 55396, University Library of Munich, Germany.
    • Handle: RePEc:pra:mprapa:55396
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    More about this item

    Keywords

    Wage inequality; self selection; relative supply index; college premium; SBTC; FTFY;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • I24 - Health, Education, and Welfare - - Education - - - Education and Inequality
    • J23 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Demand and Supply of Labor - - - Labor Demand
    • J24 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Demand and Supply of Labor - - - Human Capital; Skills; Occupational Choice; Labor Productivity
    • J31 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Wages, Compensation, and Labor Costs - - - Wage Level and Structure; Wage Differentials
    • O33 - Economic Development, Innovation, Technological Change, and Growth - - Innovation; Research and Development; Technological Change; Intellectual Property Rights - - - Technological Change: Choices and Consequences; Diffusion Processes

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