Inequality and Specialization: The Growth of Low-Skill Service Jobs in the United States

By David H. Autor, David Dorn. Social Science Research Network, 2009

148 citations recorded by the source corpus.

After a decade in which wages and employment fell precipitously in low-skill occupations and expanded in high-skill occupations, the shape of U.S. earnings and job growth sharply polarized in the 1990s. Employment shares and relative earnings rose in both low and high-skill jobs, leading to a distinct U-shaped relationship between skill levels and employment and wage growth. This paper analyzes the sources of the changing shape of the lower-tail of the U.S. wage and employment distributions. A first contribution is to document a hitherto unknown fact: the twisting of the lower tail is substantially accounted for by a single proximate cause − rising employment and wages in low-education, in-person service occupations. We study the determinants of this rise at the level of local labor markets over the period of 1950 through 2005. Our approach is rooted in a model of changing task specialization in which "routine" clerical and production tasks are displaced by automation. We find that in labor markets that were initially specialized in routine-intensive occupations, employment and wages polarized after 1980, with growing employment and earnings in both high-skill occupations and low-skill service jobs.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, General Health Professions

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/71501a79a9e892ac7a9b572de42dbe0c318678c5

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Citations in the corpus

Polarization and Rising Wage Inequality: Comparing the U.S. And Germany (2018, background): “Furthermore, Autor and Dorn (2009) find that employment and wages in low-skill service jobs, which involve non-routine manual tasks and which pay low wages, have grown considerably since the early 1990s. If technology is the driving force of labor market developments, we should expect to see similar”
INEQUALITY IN CITIES (2009, unknown): “…support to the results of Beaudry et al. (2006) show a link between computerization and inequality.9 A related and interesting hypothesis is that wage inequality is linked to the former concentration of low-skilled workers in routine tasks that have now been made obsolete (Autor and Dorn, 2007).”
The Impact of Low-Skilled Immigration on the Youth Labor Market (2009, methodology): “To deal with this complication (following Autor and Dorn 2009), I reweight individual observations within a county or PUMA by the fraction of that area’s population that is estimated to live in a particular commuting zone.8 Summary statistics across individuals and commuting zones are provided in…”
Wage inequality, technology and trade: 21st century evidence (2011, background): “One approach is Autor and Dorn (2009) who use US data from “commuting zones” – geographically contiguous areas that can be consistently defined over time.”
Explaining Women's Success: Technological Change and the Skill Content of Women's Work (2007, background): “5 Autor and Dorn (2007) apply the same reasoning with respect to commuting zones.”
Can a Task-Based Approach Explain the Recent Changes in the German Wage Structure? (2009, background): “However, as pointed out in the introduction, the model of Autor and Dorn (2008) can rationalize increasing wage dispersion at the bottom of the wage distribution in light of the polarization hypothesis by a low degree of complementarity between low–wage jobs and high–wage jobs.”