Manufacturing Proposal
Measuring Geographic Differences in Technical Change in the US Manufacturing Sector Ethan Lewis Final, 26 March 2004
I. Introduction A large and growing literature examines the influence of advanced technologies on the relative wages and productivity of different workers (for example, Doms, Dunne and Troske (1997) and Autor, Katz and Krueger (1998)). These studies are motivated by indirect evidence that recent trends in technological change, such as the dissemination of information technology, have increased the relative demand for skilled workers and raised their relative wages and employment. Using microeconomic data on the use of different technologies by individual worker (the computer use supplements to the Current Population Survey) or by individual establishment (such as the Surveys of Manufacturing Technology), researchers generally find an association between technical change and increases in wage dispersion. There is some evidence, however, that the pace of technological advances has varied across regions of the US. Two key facts are that changes in relative skill ratios across different US cities are nearly uncorrelated with changes in relative wages, and that the use of computers on the job shows significant differences across local labor markets. Motivated by this evidence, the purpose of this project is to use the Surveys of Manufacturing Technology (1988, 1991 and 1993 – hereafter SMT) to develop a new geographic area series for release to the public on the use, plans to use, and reasons for using advanced manufacturing technologies, and to generate regionally representative statistical weights for future SMT micro data users interested in constructing their own regional data. As these are fairly large surveys (around 10,000 establishments were surveyed in each year) it will be feasible
1
to report statistics on at least the major categories of advanced production technology (described below) by state and in large metropolitan areas without
I. Introduction A large and growing literature examines the influence of advanced technologies on the relative wages and productivity of different workers (for example, Doms, Dunne and Troske (1997) and Autor, Katz and Krueger (1998)). These studies are motivated by indirect evidence that recent trends in technological change, such as the dissemination of information technology, have increased the relative demand for skilled workers and raised their relative wages and employment. Using microeconomic data on the use of different technologies by individual worker (the computer use supplements to the Current Population Survey) or by individual establishment (such as the Surveys of Manufacturing Technology), researchers generally find an association between technical change and increases in wage dispersion. There is some evidence, however, that the pace of technological advances has varied across regions of the US. Two key facts are that changes in relative skill ratios across different US cities are nearly uncorrelated with changes in relative wages, and that the use of computers on the job shows significant differences across local labor markets. Motivated by this evidence, the purpose of this project is to use the Surveys of Manufacturing Technology (1988, 1991 and 1993 – hereafter SMT) to develop a new geographic area series for release to the public on the use, plans to use, and reasons for using advanced manufacturing technologies, and to generate regionally representative statistical weights for future SMT micro data users interested in constructing their own regional data. As these are fairly large surveys (around 10,000 establishments were surveyed in each year) it will be feasible
1
to report statistics on at least the major categories of advanced production technology (described below) by state and in large metropolitan areas without
References: Acemoglu, Daron (1996). “A Microfoundation for Social Increasing Returns in Human Capital Accumulation.” The Quarterly Journal of Economics, Vol. 111, No. 3. (Aug., 1996), pp. 779-804 ---- (1998) 23 Appendix 1 Description of Technologies Covered in Surveys of Manufacturing Technology (1988, 1991, 1993) I The strata were formed by crossing three employment class sizes (20-99, 100-499, >500 employees) with each 3-digit SIC industry (U.S. Dept. of Commerce (1989)). The documentation reports that in certain smaller strata all establishments were surveyed. III. Results for Metropolitan Areas Lewis (2003) also proposes tabulations by metropolitan area, at least for major metropolitan areas