Labor market returns to college major specificity

Abstract

This paper defines and measures college major specificity and estimates its labor market return over a worker's life cycle. After reviewing other measures which have been used to measure specialization, we propose a novel approach grounded in human capital theory: a Gini coefficient based on the transferability of skills across occupations. We calculate and

The value of specific skills under shock: High risks and high returns

“…Our results contribute to at least two strands of the literature. First, our results relate to the literature analyzing how portable human capital is across firms, occupations, and industries (Leighton and Speer, 2020;Cortes and Gallipoli, 2018;Gathmann and Schönberg, 2010;Kambourov and Manovskii, 2009;Poletaev and Robinson, 2008;Robinson, 2018). This literature largely relied on worker mobility in response to negative demand shocks to evaluate the importance of firm specific human capital for worker mobility.…”

Returns to Different Postsecondary Investments: Institution Type, Academic Programs, and Credentials

“…The more unequal the premium across occupations, the less transferable are the skills associated with a given major. Leighton and Speer (2020) use this approach to separate majors into specific and general majors and then examine how the returns vary across these different groups. Descriptively, they provide novel evidence on how general or specific each major is, finding that education and nursing are the most specific and psychology, music, and philosophy are the most general.…”

Where the girls are: Examining and explaining the gender gap in the nursing major

“…Nursing also stands out in how concentrated the occupational outcomes of its graduates are. As documented in Leighton and Speer (), nursing is among the most “specific" majors by almost any measure. In particular, I measure the occupational specificity in the ACS of a major by calculating an occupation Hirschman–Herfindahl Index (HHI):where m denotes the major, o denotes each occupation, and S mo denotes the share of graduates from major m that work in occupation o .…”