Recently, the co-authored paper Toward an Understanding of the Returns to Cognitive Skill Across Cohorts by Assistant Professor Luo Sai from the Department of Labor Economics, School of Economics, Shanghai University of Finance and Economics, has been accepted for publication in Journal of Political Economy: Microeconomics, a top international journal in microeconomics.
Abstract
Recent research concludes that wage returns to cognitive skill have declined in the U.S. We reassess this finding. Using decomposition methods, we document the pivotal role played by dynamic shifts in the distributions of pre-labor market cognitive skill. These shifts explain the declining estimated returns, especially for white men. We discard measurement error as an explanation. Although often overlooked, grappling with changing pre-labor market skill distributions is necessary for capturing the evolution of their labor market returns. This may prove especially important in the future, given continuing changes in skill development in recent youth cohorts.
About the Author
Luo Sai is an Assistant Professor at the School of Economics, Shanghai University of Finance and Economics. Her primary research fields are labor economics and development economics. Her research papers have appeared in journals including Review of Economics and Statistics and Journal of Political Economy: Microeconomics. She presides over the Youth Project of the National Natural Science Foundation of China.
