TY  - JOUR
AU  - Goldin,Claudia
AU  - Katz,Lawrence F.
TI  - The Origins of Technology-Skill Complementarity
JF  - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series
VL  - No. 5657
PY  - 1996
Y2  - July 1996
UR  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w5657
L1  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w5657.pdf
N1  - Author contact info:
Claudia Goldin
National Bureau of Economic Research
1050 Massachusetts Ave.
Cambridge, MA 02138
Tel: 617/613-1200
Fax: 617/613-1245
E-Mail: cgoldin@harvard.edu

Lawrence F. Katz
Department of Economics
Harvard University
Cambridge, MA  02138
Tel: 617/495-5148
Fax: 617/613-1245
E-Mail: lkatz@harvard.edu
AB  - Current concern with relationships among particular technologies, capital, and the wage structure motivates this study of the origins of technology-skill complementarity in manufacturing.  We offer evidence of the existence of technology-skill and capital-skill (relative) complementarities from 1909 to 1929, and suggest that they were associated with continuous-process and batch methods and the adoption of electric motors.  Industries that used more capital per worker and a greater proportion of their horsepower in the form of purchased electricity employed relatively more educated blue-collar workers in 1940 and paid their blue-collar workers substantially more from 1909 to 1929. We also infer capital-skill complementarity using the wage-bill for non-production workers and find that the relationship was as large from 1909-19 as it has been recently. Finally, we link our findings to those on the high-school movement (1910 to 1940). The rapid increase in the supply of skills from 1910 to 1940 may have prevented rising inequality with technological change.
ER  -