Work of the Past, Work of the Future
Name
pandp.20191110.pdf
Description
Published version
Size
3.64 MB
Format
Adobe PDF
Checksum (MD5)
3ac0f7253eab0f4fb272bc545a81db1a
Author(s)
Autor, David H
Date Issued
May 2019
Journal
American Economic Association Papers and Proceedings
Publisher
American Economic Association
Citation
Autor, David H. "Work of the Past, Work of the Future." American Economic Association Papers and Proceedings 109 (May 2019): 1-32.
Version
Final published version
Abstract
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.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Economics
Sloan School of Management
Terms of Use
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.
Persistent DSpace Link
DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1257/pandp.20191110
