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

9515216戈尔丁这个项目考察了中学的兴起--这是20世纪大部分时间最重要的教育进步，以及快速教育变革的经济后果--包括生产力和工资结构的变化。它阐述了教育增加的原因以及公共部门发挥了什么作用。研究的问题包括：工资结构是否总是随着新技术的发展而扩大，以及它如何应对受过教育的劳动力供应的增加？中学是均匀地分布在各州，还是有些学校在几十年前就接受了这项运动？教育更进步的地区是否因为过去当地溢出效应更大而从公共部门投资中获得回报？在过去的一个世纪里，教育存量的增长是什么？它是如何影响经济增长的？贯穿该项目的一个主题是平等主义在扩大教育及其在社会和经济中加强性质的重要性。特别令人感兴趣的是这个项目将创建的新的教育流数据。1940年的人口普查是第一次询问美国人的教育情况，但年长人群的回答已经被质疑了一段时间。这个项目通过从流动数据中建立人力资本存量的修正估计，然后使用它们来修正一些众所周知的人力资本在经济增长中的作用的估计，从而创建修正的估计。初步工作表明，这些新的数据系列往往与1940年人口普查得出的数据大相径庭，这表明教育在经济增长中的作用可能比之前认为的更大。

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.