Major Complexity Index and College Skill Production

Li, Xiaoxiao; Linde, Sebastian; Shimao, Hajime

doi:10.2139/ssrn.3791651

Cited by 4 publications

(5 citation statements)

References 32 publications

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“…We use data from the near universe of online job postings over the period 2010-2018 to develop measures of skill and major specificity inspired by the logic of location quotients (LQs) from the literature on industry concentration, as well as measures based on cosine similarity to capture high-dimensional vectors of skills. These measures of skill and major specificity complement and extend recent developments in this space (e.g., Leighton & Speer, 2020;Li, Linde, & Shimao, 2021) by focusing on specific skill demand manifested in job ads, thereby allowing us to compute such measures based on information that precedes the employment choices of individuals, a more proximate and direct signal of skill demand independent of occupational sorting.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 96%

College majors and skills: Evidence from the universe of online job ads

et al. 2023

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 96%

College majors and skills: Evidence from the universe of online job ads

et al. 2023

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“…The nature of nestedness will introduce a nontrivial di↵usion process in product space [6]. Knowledge cannot travel without prerequisites [43,63,18,32,20,56]. That is why in order to produce the most complex products, national economies must accumulate a web of interdependent capabilities [6,4,5].…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Skills acquisition does not come at random. It is not a series of independent events but rather a cumulative, almost directional process conditional on previous attainments [17,18,19,20,21,22]. The existence of such an interdependency web is not in doubt as it manifests in education and career paths and thus shapes the social and economic systems [23,24].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Deconstructing Human Capital to Construct Hierarchical Nestedness

Hosseinioun¹,

Neffke²,

Le-Tian³

et al. 2023

Preprint

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Modern economies generate immensely diverse complex goods and services by coordinating e↵orts and know-how of people in vast networks that span across the globe. This increasing complexity puts us under the pressure of acquiring an ever-increasing specialized and yet diverse skill portfolio in order to stay e↵ective members of a complex economy. Here, we analyze the skill portfolios of workers in an e↵ort to understand the latent structure and evolution of these portfolios. Analyzing the U.S. survey data (2003)(2004)(2005)(2006)(2007)(2008)(2009)(2010)(2011)(2012)(2013)(2014)(2015)(2016)(2017)(2018)(2019) and 20 million resumes, we uncover a tree structure of vertical skill dependencies such that skills that only a few jobs need (specialized) are located at the leaves under the broadly demanded (general skills). The resulting structure exhibits an unbalanced tree shape. The unbalanced shape allows the further categorization of specialized skills: nested, branching out of a deeply rooted sturdy trunk reflecting a dense web of common prerequisites, and un-nested, lacking such support. Our longitudinal analyses show individuals indeed become more specialized, going down the nested paths as moving up the career ladder to enjoy higher wage premiums. The specialization, however, is most likely accompanied by demands for a higher level of general skills, and furthermore, specialization without the strengthening of general skills is deprived of wage premiums. We examine the geographic and demographic distribution of skills to explain disparities in wealth. Finally, historical changes in occupation skill requirements show these branches have become more fragmented over the decade, suggesting the increasing labor gap.

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“…However, most empirical work relies on coarse labor distinctions, such as college major and institutional information (e.g., school brands), to explain these occupational trends [6][7][8][9]. While useful, these coarse educational and labor categories may hide further insights into the skills of "high-skilled" workers that contribute to positive career outcomes [10].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Connecting higher education to workplace activities and earnings

et al. 2023

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Higher education is a source of skill acquisition for many middle- and high-skilled jobs. But what specific skills do universities impart on students to prepare them for desirable careers? In this study, we analyze a large novel corpora of over one million syllabi from over eight hundred bachelors’ granting US educational institutions to connect material taught in higher education to the detailed work activities in the US economy as reported by the US Department of Labor. First, we show how differences in taught skills both within and between college majors correspond to earnings differences of recent graduates. Further, we use the co-occurrence of taught skills across all of academia to predict the skills that will be taught in a major moving forward. Our unified information system connecting workplace skills to the skills taught during higher education can improve the workforce development of high-skilled workers, inform educational programs of future trends, and enable employers to quantify the skills of potential workers.

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Major Complexity Index and College Skill Production

Cited by 4 publications

References 32 publications

College majors and skills: Evidence from the universe of online job ads

College majors and skills: Evidence from the universe of online job ads

Deconstructing Human Capital to Construct Hierarchical Nestedness

Connecting higher education to workplace activities and earnings

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