Volume 28, Number 3 (Summer) 1993
Acs, Gregory, and Sheldon Danziger. 1993. "Educational Attainment, Industrial Structure, and Male Earnings Through the 1980s." Journal of Human Resources 28(3):618-648.
Between 1979 and 1989,men's average earnings declined and the percentage of men with low earnings increased. Much of the decline in mean earnings and the increased incidence of low earnings can be accounted for by changes in the returns to education, experience, and industry of employment - changes that we attribute to demand-side factors, such as changes in technology. Shifts in industrial employment patterns had a relatively small effect on mean earnings and low earning rates. However, their effects were larger among blacks than among whites and Hispanics. We also find that educational upgrading over the decade kept mean earnings from falling even further and helped to hold down the growth of low earnings, especially among blacks.
Gregory Acs is a research associate at the urban Institute, Income and benefits Policy Center in Washington, D.C. Sheldon Danziger is a professor of Social Work and Public Policy and Faculty Associate in Population Studies at the University of Michigan. Support for this research was provided by the Research Partnership Program of the University of Michigan's Rackham School of Graduate Studies, by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services through a grant to the Institute for Research on Poverty at the University of Wisconsin, and by the Russell Sage and Ford Foundations. Thomas Donley, Jon Haveman, Robert Wood, and especially Sharon Parrott provided computational assistance; Cecile Brach, Lawrence Buron, Edward Gramlich, Robert Haveman, Markus Jantti, Sanders Korenman, Richard Michel, Gary Solon, Elaine Sorenson, and Robert Wood provided comments on earlier drafts. The authors would also like to thank two anonymous referees for their helpful suggestions. All opinions and errors are those of the author' alone. The data used in this article can be obtained beginning in December 1993 through December 1996 from Sheldon Danziger, Institute for Public Policy Studies, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI 48109-1220.
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