Capital-Skill Complementarity and Inequality: A Macroeconomic Analysis

There have been striking postwar changes in the supply and price of skilled labor relative to unskilled labor. The relative quantity of skilled labor has increased substantially, and the skill premium, which is the wage of skilled labor relative to unskilled labor, has grown significantly since 1980. Many studies have found that it is difficult to account for the increase in the skill premium on the basis of observable variables and have concluded that latent skill-biased technological change is the main factor responsible for the increase. This paper develops a framework that provides a simple, explicit economic mechanism for understanding skill-biased technological change in terms of observable variables and uses the framework to evaluate the fraction of variation in the skill premium that can be accounted for by changes in observed factor quantities. We use a version of the neoclassical growth model in which the key feature of the aggregate technology is capital-skill complementar...