DOES UNMEASURED ABILITY EXPLAIN THE HIGHER WAGES OF NEW TECHNOLOGY WORKERS

We study the impact on New Technologies (NT) on wages using a unique d ata set that matches data on individuals and on their firms. In his im portant article on the same topic, Krueger (1993) did not give a defin itive answer to the following question: if workers who use NT are bett er paid, is it because they are abler or because NT increases their pr oductivity. We try to provide a precise answer to this question. Compa ring cross-section estimates, firm effect estimates and person effect estimates, we show that computer-based new technologies are used by ab ler workers. These workers appear to become more productive when they get more experienced with these NT. In terms of wage differentials, th e introduction of computer-based NT contributes to the increase but le ss than supposed before. Each year, experience with computer-based NT adds around 1% to the wage of workers using such techniques.