The Changing Distribution of Job Specificity

The workforce in the U.S. is more college educated than ever before. College graduates replaced the majority of jobs lost during the Great Recession, yet the college wage premium remains. I find a subsequent change in the skills required of employees. In a task-based model, I demonstrate how this skillset shift favors general human capital over specific. The theoretical innovation is to classify general human capital as a risk-reducing option for employers. The empirical innovation is to measure general and specific human capital within a major using a major’s information content about occupational choice and skills. This measure has a direct interpretation in the theoretical model. Using machine learning, I present evidence that highly content-specific college majors experienced greater wage losses and have been slower to recover after the Great Recession.