The Growth of Low-Skill Service Jobs and the Polarization of the US Labor Market
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Autor_The growth of low.pdf
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1 MB
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Author(s)
Autor, David H.
Dorn, David
Date Issued
August 2013
Journal
American Economic Review
Publisher
American Economic Association
Citation
Autor, David H, and David Dorn."The Growth of Low-Skill Service Jobs and the Polarization of the US Labor Market." American Economic Review 103(5): (2013).1553–1597.
Version
Final published version
Abstract
We offer a unified analysis of the growth of low-skill service occupations between 1980 and 2005 and the concurrent polarization of US employment and wages. We hypothesize that polarization stems from the interaction between consumer preferences, which favor variety over specialization, and the falling cost of automating routine, codifiable job tasks. Applying a spatial equilibrium model, we corroborate four implications of this hypothesis. Local labor markets that specialized in routine tasks differentially adopted information technology, reallocated low-skill labor into service occupations (employment polarization), experienced earnings growth at the tails of the distribution (wage polarization), and received inflows of skilled labor.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Economics
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Article is made available in accordance with the publisher's policy and may be subject to US copyright law. Please refer to the publisher's site for terms of use.
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DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1257/aer.103.5.1553
