Measuring Skill Intensity of Occupations with Imperfect Substitutability Across Skill Types

In absence of a model-based measure of occupational skill-intensity, the litera- ture on wage inequality cannot consistently track technological progress on occu- pational level - a key ingredient of recent theories of labor market polarization. In this paper, I use the March CPS data from 1983 to 2002 to estimate such a measure corresponding to occupation-specific relative productivities of college and high-school educated. With imperfect substitution across skill types, the measure- ment of relative productivities requires estimation of substitution elasticities, and I propose a simple strategy to obtain these. The resulting measure is used to shed light on the modified skill-biased technological change hypothesis proposed by Autor et al. (2006).