• Journal of the Korean Regional Science Association
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• v.33 no.2
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• pp.3-23
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• 2017

This study aims to understand how human capital is related to the inter-regional wage gap between the capital region and the non-capital region in Korea. We focus more specifically on whether the inter-regional wage gap is due to high levels of human capital in the capital region or due to high returns to human capital in the capital region. The decomposition method based on the unconditional quantile regression was used to examine how the relationship between human capital and the inter-regional wage gap varies along the wage distribution. When first estimating earnings functions from the two regions to apply this decomposition method, we included not only conventional indicators of human capital, such as education and on-the-job training, but also occupational skills including cognitive-interactive skills, technical skills, and physical skills. As a result, other things being equal, a large part of the inter-regional wage gap was explained by the human capital variables. Although the composition effect of the human capital variables existed in all the wage quantiles, the more important factor was the wage structure effect of the human capital variables. In addition, among the various human capital variables, the wage structure effect of years of education was a key factor in explaining the inter-regional wage gap. This study is meaningful in that it shows that the relationship between human capital and the inter-regional wage gap may vary depending on the wage quantiles.