Extending the Race between Education and Technology

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.