Work of the Past, Work of the Future
By David H. Autor. AEA Papers and Proceedings, 2019
496 citations recorded by the source corpus.
US cities today are vastly more educated and skill-intensive than they were five decades ago. Yet, urban non-college workers perform substantially less skilled jobs than decades earlier. This deskilling reflects the joint effects of automation and, secondarily, rising international trade, which have eliminated the bulk of non-college production, administrative support, and clerical jobs, yielding a disproportionate polarization of urban labor markets. The unwinding of the urban non-college occupational skill gradient has, I argue, abetted a secular fall in real non-college wages by: (1) shunting non-college workers out of specialized middle-skill occupations into low-wage occupations that require only generic skills; (2) diminishing the set of non-college workers that hold middle-skill jobs in high-wage cities; and (3) attenuating, to a startling degree, the steep urban wage premium for non-college workers that prevailed in earlier decades. Changes in the nature of work--many of which are technological in origin--have been more disruptive and less beneficial for non-college than college workers.
Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, General Health Professions
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/98ed83527e84b1dfa60917987d0b4ec1d6e5293e
How researchers see this paper
The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.
In Economics and Econometrics
- P. Restrepo
- David H. Autor
- Daron Acemoglu
- A. Salomons
- B. Seegmiller
- Caroline Chin
- Bob Rijkers
- Caglar Ozden
In General Health Professions
- Daron Acemoglu
- P. Restrepo
- A. Salomons
- David H. Autor
- B. Seegmiller
- Caroline Chin
- Bob Rijkers
- Lawrence M. Kahn
Citations in the corpus
- The Labor Market Impacts of Technological Change: From Unbridled Enthusiasm to Qualified Optimism to Vast Uncertainty (2022, background): “Figure 2, reproduced from Autor (2019), depicts the steep rise of earnings inequality by education group.”
- Who on Earth Can Work from Home? (2020, background): “…as well as Mexico and China (Artuc, Christiaensen, and Winkler 2019; Giuntella andWang 2019; Graetz and Michaels 2018; Acemoglu and Restrepo 2020).4 Autor (2015, 2019) argues that the technological progress “pushed the demand for skilled labor over many decades and will continue to do so.””
- Global Sustainable Development Report 2019 (2019, unknown): “74 Autor, 2019.”
- New Frontiers: The Origins and Content of New Work, 1940–2018 (2022, methodology): “43See Autor et al. (2016) for a summary of this evidence.”
- Tasks, Automation, and the Rise in US Wage Inequality (2021, methodology): “Formally, we impose: (12)The idea that routine tasks are easier to automate is the main premise of Autor, Levy and Murnane (2003) and”
- The Geography of Remote Work (2020, unknown): “This adds to the already precarious condition of low-skill service workers, which have suffered in recent years from skyrocketing house prices (see Couture, Gaubert, Handbury, and Hurst, 2019) and stagnant wages (see Autor, 2019).”