On May 31st, 2016: Professor Joseph Kaboski, who is the David F. and Erin M. Seng Foundation Professor of Economics in the Department of Economics at the University of Nortre Dame, visited GSIS to give a special lecture on his latest research on “Skill-biased Structural Changes”. This paper has two other authors, Francisco J. Buera and Richard Rogerson, and was published in the National Bureau of Economic Research in 2015. Main findings and implications of this research are the following: Given the fact that development is associated with increase in relative demand for high-skill workers, they built a two-sector model to assess the contribution of skill-biased structural changes to the rise of the skill premium in these advanced economies including U.S. As a result, they find that technological change overall increased the skill premium by almost 100 percentage points and that between 25 and 30 percent of this change is caused by compositional changes from technological change. This finding implies that even in the absence of further skill-biased technological changes, skill premium would continue to grow under the influence of compositional changes.
