Hispanics and Their Contribution to America's Human Capital

Specifically, IPUMS USA uses the 1950 Census Bureau occupational classification, aggregating three-digit occupations into the following nine broad groups, ordered by their skill intensity:2 professional and technical workers; managers, officials and proprietors; sales workers; clerical and kindred; craftsmen; service workers; operatives; farmers and farm laborers; and unskilled laborers.3 Hispanic Workers across Occupations We start by exploring the changes in what the Hispanic-American workers do in the marketplace. First of all, the presence of Hispanic workers has grown in all occupations. To explain these findings, we argue that the education of Hispanic workers lags behind that of non-Hispanic workers, so the observed pattern is consistent with recent assignment models, in which workers choose occupations on the basis of their comparative advantage (e.g., Costinot and Vogel).6 The data suggest that the observed disadvantages of Hispanic workers in the U.S. labor markets do not seem to be the result of labor market frictions, e.g., sheer discrimination or lack of information. 2 Skill intensity is measured by the percentage of workers in an occupation with the highest year of school degree completed in 1950 being college or more. [...]the higher the percentage of workers in an occupation with at least a college degree in 1950, the more skill-intensive an occupation is.