Despite post-college degree holders now making up nearly 15 percent of the adult workforce in America and Britain, studies of their labour market performance remain sparse. This is surprising given they are the most educated group of workers in the labour force and when, as is very clearly shown in this paper, over time they have done significantly better in terms of their economic rewards from work. Their relative supply has increased and at the same their wages relative to college only graduates and to non-college workers have risen. Thus the relative demand for postgraduates has sharply increased, because of their superior skill sets and because they work in more productive jobs, namely the non-routine occupations that have expanded their employment shares in the upper part of the job growth distribution. We show these patterns of change using data from the United States and Great Britain. The increase in the demand for postgraduates is a key factor in understanding why wage inequality has risen within the increasingly heterogeneous college graduate workforce.
Presented by:
Joanne Lindley (King's College London)
Date & time:
February 23, 2015 4:00 pm - February 23, 2015 5:30 pm
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