Relative Wage Patterns among the Highly Educated in a Knowledge-based Economy

By René Morissette, Yuri Ostrovsky and Garnett Picot
Statistics Canada

ABSTRACT

The present study extends previous work on the evolution of the education premium and investigates the existence of diverging university/high school earnings ratio trends across industries in the knowledge-based economy. The study also provides additional information about the changing demand for high-skilled workers by comparing relative wages of university graduates holding degrees in “applied” fields to those of other university graduates (“field” premium). The main finding of this paper is that even though employment grew much faster in high-knowledge industries than in other sectors during the last two decades, trends in relative wages and real wages of university and high school graduates have displayed remarkably similar patterns across industries.

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