Snakes or Ladders? Skill Upgrading and Occupational Mobility in the US and the UK during the 1990s
It is frequently argued that the process of skill upgrading has both worsened the employment prospects and decreased the relative wages of unskilled workers. However, workers are not immutably either low skill or high skill, and skill upgrading may offer the opportunity for workers to move up the ‘skill ladder’. In this paper we examine the balance of these two effects. We use comparable individual-level panel data from the US and the UK to relate the probability of individual occupational movement to the extent of skill upgrading at the industry level. We find that whilst skill upgrading does indeed have a positive impact on the probability of moving up the job ladder, this is insufficient to outweigh the increased probability of unemployment. We also find that workers moving down or off the ladder suffer large wage penalties.
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.
| Length: | |
| Date of creation: | |
| Date of revision: | |
| Handle: | RePEc:not:notgep:07/38 |
| Contact details of provider: | Postal: School of Economics University of Nottingham University Park Nottingham NG7 2RD Phone: (44) 0115 951 5620 Fax: (0115) 951 4159 Web page: http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/gep/index.aspx More information through EDIRC
|
No references listed on IDEAS
You can help add them by filling out this form.
This item is not listed on Wikipedia, on a reading list or among the top items on IDEAS.
When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:not:notgep:07/38. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.
For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: (Hilary Hughes)
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.