Field of Study and Earnings Inequality among the Highly Educated

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 pop-ulation between 1993 and 2010 using the National Survey of College Graduates. After documenting changes that increase earnings inequal-ity, 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 incorpo-rate field of study into the decomposition. We conclude with consid-eration of why large changes in inter-field earnings differentials did not lead to comparable changes in the flow of entrants