This Job is 'Getting Old': Measuring Changes in Job Opportunities Using Occupational Age Structure

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

239 citations recorded by the source corpus.

High- and low-wage occupations are expanding rapidly relative to middle-wage occupations in both the U.S. and the E.U. We study the reallocation of workers from middle-skill occupations towards the tails of the occupational skill distribution by analyzing changes in age structure within and across occupations. Because occupations typically expand by hiring young workers and contract by curtailing such hiring, we posit that growing occupations will get younger while shrinking occupations will 'get old.' After verifying this proposition, we apply this observation to local labor markets in the U.S. to test whether markets that were specialized in middle-skilled occupations in 1980 saw a differential movement of both older and younger workers into occupations at the tails of the skill distribution over the subsequent 25 years. Consistent with aggregate trends, employment in initially middle-skill-intensive labor markets hollowed-out between 1980 and 2005. Employment losses among non-college workers in the middle of the occupational skill distribution were almost entirely countered by employment growth in lower-tail occupations. For college workers, employment losses at the middle were offset in roughly equal measures by gains in the upper- and lower-tails of the occupational skill distribution. But gains at the upper-tail were almost entirely limited to young college workers. Consequently, older college workers are increasingly found in lower-skill, lower-paying occupations.

Subfields: Demography, Economics and Econometrics, Gender Studies

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/8c264830ad446b8216bac15c55f02159cc5bd11c

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Demography

1. David H. Autor
2. Danny Yagan

In Economics and Econometrics

1. J. Schmitt
2. Lawrence R. Mishel
3. Heidi S. Shierholz
4. David H. Autor
5. Daron Acemoglu
6. P. Restrepo
7. Danny Yagan
8. A. Salomons

In Gender Studies

1. J. Schmitt
2. David H. Autor

Citations in the corpus

• Immigration and Wage Dynamics: Evidence from the Mexican Peso Crisis (2020, unknown): “This suggests using a partition of the US territory, an observation also made in Autor and Dorn (2009). They use commuting zones (CZ), which are constructed based on commuting patterns from the 1990 US Census based on the work by Tolbert and Sizer (1996).”
• ASSESSING THE JOB POLARIZATION EXPLANATION OF GROWING WAGE INEQUALITY (2013, background): “Consistent occupation codes for Census years 1980, 1990, and 2000, and 2008 are from Autor and Dorn (2009a).”
• The polarization of job opportunities in the U.S. labor market: implications for employment and earnings (2011, background): “A contemporaneous study by Autor and Dorn (2009a) offers a different perspective on these same facts.”