Education, Technology, and the Wage Structure: Human Capital and the Economy during the Past Century

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9515216 Goldin This project examines the rise of secondary schools -- the most important educational advance for much of the 20th century, and the economic consequences of rapid educational change -- including productivity and wage-structure shifts. It addresses why education increased and what role was played by the public sector. Questions studied include: Did the wage structure always widen with new technologies, and how did it respond to increased supplied of educated labor? Did secondary schools diffuse evenly across the states or did some embrace the movement decades earlier? Did the areas with more progressive education reap returns from their public-sector investments because local spill- over effects were greater in the past? What was the growth of the educational stock and how did it impact economic growth over the past century? A theme running through the project is the importance of egalitarianism in expanding education and its reinforcing nature in society and the economy. Of special interest is the new educational-flow data that will be created by this project. The 1940 census was the first to inquire about the education of Americans, but the responses of the older cohorts have been questioned for some time. This project creates corrected estimates of the human capital stock by building them up from the flow data and then using them to revise some well-know estimates of the role of human capital in economic growth. Preliminary work suggests that these new data series are often vastly different from those derived from the 1940 census and this indicates that education's role in economic growth may have been larger than previously thought.