I explain changes in the wage structure favoring more skilled workers since 1980 using job task data from the Occupational Information Network and wage data from the March CPS. Using recently developed partialling out estimators including debiased machine learning, I obtain wage effects for a suite of tasks, including a novel computer task…

This dissertation examines issues regarding the educational attainment of the U.S. workforce. Specifically, I investigate the impact of various factors on the growth of postsecondary educational attainment. This includes issues pertaining to improving the skill-level of the workforce at the regional or state level, as well as for the domestic…