The canonical supply-demand model of the wage returns to skill has been extremely influential; however, it faced several important challenges. Several studies show that standard approach sometimes produces theoretically wrong-signed elasticities substitution, yields counterintuitive paths for skill-biased technical change (SBTC), and does not account observed deviations in college premia younge...

We introduce skill chaining, a skill discovery method for reinforcement learning agents in continuous domains. Skill chaining produces chains of skills leading to an end-of-task reward. We demonstrate experimentally that skill chaining is able to create appropriate skills in a challenging continuous domain and that doing so results in performance gains.

Current concerns over reforming engineering education have focused attention on helping students develop skills and an adaptive expertise. Phenomenological guidelines for instruction along these lines can be understood as arising out of an emerging theory of thinking and learning built on results in the neural, cognitive, and behavioral sciences. We outline this framework and consider some of i...