Labor Quality, the Demand for Skill, and Market Selection

This paper investigates some alternative definitions of labor for productivity and demand analysis. The paper is organized as follows: Section II considers the organization of work activities in a simple fixed coefficient technology in the presence of comparative advantage among various classes of workers. Assuming that the number of independent productive activities exceeds the number of comparative advantage classes, an application of the envelope theorem shows the derivation from first principles of a neoclassical production function with input dimension (the number of workers of each type) smaller than the engineering technology(the number of activities). This is the basic result illustrating that occupational classifications depend on both the technology and the distribution of skills (factor supplies) in the working population, a fact that may be relevant to international and other cross-sectional differences in productivity and the demand for labor. The situation is reversed^in section III, which treats the case where the number of worker classifications exceeds the number of production activities. In this case the micro-technology cannot be reduced below the basic set of wo