{"title":"Two Faces of Comprehensive Information Technology, Knowledge Acquisition, and Polarized Wage Structure","authors":"Sung‐min Kim","doi":"10.17256/JER.2012.17.2.002","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"Garicano (2000) and Garicano and Rossi-Hansberg (2006) distinguish comprehensive information technology advances between information technology advances and communication technology advances, both of which have qualitatively different characteristics. Based on this distinction, this paper shows that, first, decreasing knowledge acquisition costs, due to advances in information technology, raise wage differentials between problem solvers and production workers and within-group wage differentials. Second, cheaper communication costs, due to communication technology advances, increase wage inequality between problem solvers and production workers and within-group wage inequality for problem solvers, but decrease within-group wage inequality for production workers. These heterogeneous impacts of information and communication technology advances on between-group wage inequality and on within-group wage inequality would provide a rationale for a wage polarization pattern in the recent U.S. labor market in which there is an increasing wage inequality in the upper-tail of wage distribution and a decreasing wage inequality in the lowertail of wage distribution.","PeriodicalId":90860,"journal":{"name":"International journal of economic research","volume":"81 1","pages":"139-158"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0000,"publicationDate":"2012-08-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"International journal of economic research","FirstCategoryId":"1085","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.17256/JER.2012.17.2.002","RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":null,"ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"","JCRName":"","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0
Abstract
Garicano (2000) and Garicano and Rossi-Hansberg (2006) distinguish comprehensive information technology advances between information technology advances and communication technology advances, both of which have qualitatively different characteristics. Based on this distinction, this paper shows that, first, decreasing knowledge acquisition costs, due to advances in information technology, raise wage differentials between problem solvers and production workers and within-group wage differentials. Second, cheaper communication costs, due to communication technology advances, increase wage inequality between problem solvers and production workers and within-group wage inequality for problem solvers, but decrease within-group wage inequality for production workers. These heterogeneous impacts of information and communication technology advances on between-group wage inequality and on within-group wage inequality would provide a rationale for a wage polarization pattern in the recent U.S. labor market in which there is an increasing wage inequality in the upper-tail of wage distribution and a decreasing wage inequality in the lowertail of wage distribution.
Garicano(2000)和Garicano and Rossi-Hansberg(2006)将综合信息技术进步区分为信息技术进步和通信技术进步,两者具有质的不同特征。基于这一区别,本文表明,首先,由于信息技术的进步,知识获取成本的降低,提高了问题解决者与生产工人之间的工资差异以及群体内的工资差异。其次,由于通信技术的进步,通信成本的降低,增加了问题解决者与生产工人之间的工资不平等以及问题解决者的群体内工资不平等,但减少了生产工人的群体内工资不平等。信息和通信技术进步对群体间工资不平等和群体内工资不平等的这些异质影响将为近期美国劳动力市场的工资两极分化模式提供理论依据,在这种模式中,工资分配的上尾工资不平等加剧,而工资分配的下尾工资不平等减少。