TY  - JOUR
AU  - Philippon,Thomas
AU  - Reshef,Ariell
TI  - Skill Biased Financial Development: Education, Wages and Occupations in the U.S. Financial Sector
JF  - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series
VL  - No. 13437
PY  - 2007
Y2  - September 2007
UR  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w13437
L1  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w13437.pdf
N1  - Author contact info:
Thomas Philippon
New York University
Stern School of Business
44 West 4th Street, Suite 9-190
New York, NY  10012-1126
Tel: 212/998-0490
Fax: 212/995-4233
E-Mail: tphilipp@stern.nyu.edu

Ariell Reshef
University of Virginia
Department of Economics
P.O. Box 400182
Charlottesville, VA 22904-4182
Tel: 434-243-4977
Fax: 434-982-2904 
E-Mail: ariellr@virginia.edu
AB  - Over the past 60 years, the U.S. financial sector has grown from 2.3% to 7.7% of GDP. While the growth in the share of value added has been fairly linear, it hides a dramatic change in the composition of skills and occupations. In the early 1980s, the financial sector started paying higher wages and hiring more skilled individuals than the rest of economy. These trends reflect a shift away from low-skill jobs and towards market-oriented activities within the sector. Our evidence suggests that technological and financial innovations both played a role in this transformation. We also document an increase in relative wages, controlling for education, which partly reflects an increase in unemployment risk: Finance jobs used to be safer than other jobs in the private sector, but this is not longer the case.
ER  -