New Evidence on the Returns to Job Skills
利用职业技能需求数据，分析劳动力市场如何评估工人的工作技能，并指出家庭调查中职业编码错误对研究的影响。
The typical Mincerian wage equation examines wages in relation to the education, potential experience, and other personal characteristics of job incumbents. These characteristics serve as proxies for the job holder’s skill level, but do not indicate what specific skills are being rewarded. A number of recent papers make use of data on occupational skill requirements, which have proven useful for understanding shifts in labor demand (see, for example, David Autor, Frank Levy, and Richard Murnane 2003; Maarten Goos and Alan Manning 2007) as well as for understanding the relationship between wages and specific job skills (see, for example, Beth Ingram and George Neumann 2006; Autor and Michael Handel 2008). To the extent that the labor market does a good job of matching individuals to jobs for which they are well suited, such analyses can shed new light on how workers’ job skills are valued in the labor market. Studies that focus on job skills generally begin with data from the Current Population Survey (CPS) or another household survey that contains information on the detailed occupation in which people work. Information on required job skills is attached to the survey records according to reported occupation. There is considerable evidence, however, of significant errors in the coding of occupation in household survey data. Wesley Mellow and Hal Sider (1983) find disagreements between the occupation recorded in CPS data compared to that based on information supplied by individuals’ employers for 19 percent of jobs at the major occupation level and 42 percent at the detailed occupation level. Nancy Mathiowetz (1992) reports similar findings for the employees of a large manufacturing firm. Comparisons of aggregate data on the number of jobs in each of 19 broad occupations from the New Evidence on the Returns to Job Skills