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Abstract
Field of study specializes individuals’ human capital in ways that might
be either substitutable or complementary to technological change. We
study changes in the earnings distribution of the college-educated population
between 1993 and 2010 using the National Survey of College
Graduates. After documenting changes that increase earnings inequality,
we decompose them into composition and wage-structure effects.
We find that composition effects account for virtually none of the growth
of inequality and, in fact, are surprisingly small, even after we incorporate
field of study into the decomposition. We conclude with speculation
about why large inter-field changes in earnings did not lead to
comparable changes in the flow of entrants.