Advanced Search
MyIDEAS: Login

Skill Premium in Chile: Studying Skill Upgrading in the South

Contents:

Author Info

  • Francisco Gallego.

Abstract

The evolution of the skill premium (i.e., the wage di erential between skilled and unskilled workers) has interest from at least two perspectives: it is a rough measure of inequality among workers of di erent quali cations and provides information on the characteristics of the development process of the economy. In this paper, I investigate empirically the evolution of the skill premium in Chile over the last 40 years. After some uctuations in the 1960s and 1970s, the skill premium increased in the 1980s and has remained roughly constant since then. The data suggest that this evolution is an outcome of a signi cant increase in relative demand for skilled workers in the 1980s and 1990s and a sizeable increase in the relative supply in the 1990s. Sectoral evidence shows that, after controlling for sector and time e ects, (i) the relative demand increased faster in the same industries in Chile than in the US and (ii) the correlation is stronger for tradable industries and non-tradable industries that are intensive in imported capital, as expected. This result is consistent with a number of theories that link skill upgrading in developed and developing countries. To try to disentangle among these theories, I present time series evidence suggesting that, after controlling for other determinants of skill premium, not only there is a positive correlation between skill premium in Chile and in the US but also the size of the correlation is consistent with the Acemoglu (2003a) model of endogenous technological choice in which new technologies are produced in developed countries (like the US) and adopted in developing economies(like Chile).

Download Info

If you experience problems downloading a file, check if you have the proper application to view it first. In case of further problems read the IDEAS help page. Note that these files are not on the IDEAS site. Please be patient as the files may be large.
File URL: http://www.economia.puc.cl/docs/dt_377.pdf
Download Restriction: no

Bibliographic Info

Paper provided by Instituto de Economia. Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile. in its series Documentos de Trabajo with number 377.

as in new window
Length:
Date of creation: 2010
Date of revision:
Handle: RePEc:ioe:doctra:377

Contact details of provider:
Postal: Avda. Vicuña Mackenna 4860, Macul, Santiago
Phone: (562) 354-4303
Fax: (562) 553-1664
Email:
Web page: http://www.economia.puc.cl
More information through EDIRC

Related research

Keywords: Wage premium; skill upgrading; openness; skill biased technical change; Chile;

Other versions of this item:

Find related papers by JEL classification:

This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

References

References listed on IDEAS
Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.:
as in new window
  1. Sanchez-Paramo, Carolina & Schady, Norbert, 2003. "Off and running? Technology, trade and the rising demand for skilled workers in Latin America," Policy Research Working Paper Series 3015, The World Bank.
Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

Citations

Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
as in new window

Cited by:
  1. Jonathan Vogel & Javier Cravino & Ariel Burstein, 2011. "Importing Skill-Biased Technology," 2011 Meeting Papers 440, Society for Economic Dynamics.

Lists

This item is not listed on Wikipedia, on a reading list or among the top items on IDEAS.

Statistics

Access and download statistics

Corrections

When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:ioe:doctra:377

For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: (Amparo García).

If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

If references are entirely missing, you can add them using this form.

If the full references list an item that is present in RePEc, but the system did not link to it, you can help with this form.

If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.