Technological change, skill formation and income inequality

"This project is part of a broader research agenda that focuses on the interaction between technological progress and investment in education as key factors in shaping the income inequality around the world, both within and across countries. The increase in income inequality over the last decades has recently become a hotly debated topic by researchers and policy makers alike.
First I study how larger flows of capital and technologies across countries interact with the incentives to invest in education in the developing world. There is now a substantial literature on the impact of technological change on human capital accumulation in developed economies. However, there is much less work done on the effect of technical progress on the human capital accumulation and productivity of different sectors in the adopting countries. Thus, one of the project’s goals is to evaluate quantitatively the importance of human capital accumulation in explaining the stark productivity (and income) differences across countries that we observe in the data.
Next, I investigate the impact of college enrollment expansion generated by technological change on graduates’ academic achievements and labor market outcomes when universities adapt to higher enrollments by adjusting academic standards. For example, in the US, elite universities have become more selective over the last decades, while the opposite occurred in non-elite institutions. So far, the literature focused on firms’ response to technological change in explaining the changes in wages of college graduates over the last decades. This project is the first attempt (to my knowledge) to study the college graduates’ outcomes in connection with changes in the process of skill production within the university and the changing ability distribution of the student body, triggered by a higher demand for skilled labor.
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"This project is part of a broader research agenda that focuses on the interaction between technological progress and investment in education as key factors in shaping the income inequality around the world, both within and across countries. The increase in income inequality over the last decades has recently become a hotly debated topic by researchers and policy makers alike.
First I study how larger flows of capital and technologies across countries interact with the incentives to invest in education in the developing world. There is now a substantial literature on the impact of technological change on human capital accumulation in developed economies. However, there is much less work done on the effect of technical progress on the human capital accumulation and productivity of different sectors in the adopting countries. Thus, one of the project’s goals is to evaluate quantitatively the importance of human capital accumulation in explaining the stark productivity (and income) differences across countries that we observe in the data.
Next, I investigate the impact of college enrollment expansion generated by technological change on graduates’ academic achievements and labor market outcomes when universities adapt to higher enrollments by adjusting academic standards. For example, in the US, elite universities have become more selective over the last decades, while the opposite occurred in non-elite institutions. So far, the literature focused on firms’ response to technological change in explaining the changes in wages of college graduates over the last decades. This project is the first attempt (to my knowledge) to study the college graduates’ outcomes in connection with changes in the process of skill production within the university and the changing ability distribution of the student body, triggered by a higher demand for skilled labor.
"