HCEO WORKING PAPER SERIES Working Paper The University of Chicago 1126 E. 59th Street Box 107 Chicago IL 60637 www.hceconomics.org 1 Skills, Degrees, and Labor Market Inequality 1 2 3 Peter Q. Blair* , Papia Debroy , Justin Heck Affiliations: 1 Graduate School of Education, Harvard University; Cambridge, MA, USA. National Bureau of Economics Research, Harvard University; Cambridge, MA, USA. Opportunity@Work; Washington, D.C., USA. 2 Opportunity@Work; Washington, D.C., USA. 3 Department of Political Science, University of Michigan; Ann Arbor, MI, USA. *Corresponding author. Email:
[email protected] Abstract: Over the past four decades, income inequality grew significantly between workers with bachelor’s degrees and those with high school diplomas (often called “unskilled”). Rather than being unskilled, we argue that these workers are STARs because they are skilled through alternative routes—namely their work experience. Using the skill requirements of a worker’s current job as a proxy of their actual skill, we find that though both groups of workers make transitions to occupations requiring similar skills to their previous occupations, workers with bachelor’s degrees have dramatically better access to higher wage occupations where the skill requirements exceed the workers’ observed skill. This measured opportunity gap offers a fresh explanation of income inequality by degree status and reestablishes the important role of on-the- job training in human capital formation. One-Sentence Summary: The opportunity gap in moving to higher wage work drives income inequality between workers with and without college degrees. Acknowledgements: We are grateful for helpful feedback on this paper from Katherine Abraham, Hunt Allcott, Desmond Ang, Susan Athey, David Autor, Byron Auguste, Isaiah Baldiserra, Chandra Childers, David Deming, Mischa Fisher, Martin Fleming, Erica L.