Berger, Mark C. 1983. "Changes in Labor Force Composition and Male Earnings: A Production Approach." Journal of Human Resources 18(2):177-196.

Models of aggregate production are estimated and used to investigate the effects of changes in labor force composition on the recently observed decline in the earnings of college graduates relative to other workers and on the fall in the earnings of younger workers relative to older workers. Changes in labor force composition explain substantial proportions of these observed earnings changes. The most important compositional change appears to have been the rapid increase in the number of young male college graduates. Projections outside the sample are consistent with depressed earnings throughout the lifetimes of the large baby-boom cohorts, especially among college graduates, but do not suggest that depressed college graduate earnings are a permanent phenomenon for all birth cohorts.

This author is a member of the Economics faculty, University of Kentucky.
This paper is taken from my Ph.D. dissertation at The Ohio State University. During the course of the research, I benefited greatly from the insightful comments and suggestions of Belton Fleisher, Tetsunori Koizumi, and Donald Parsons. Two anonymous referees also provided valuable comments on an earlier draft of this paper.

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US ISSN 0022-166X

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