Tasks and Black-white Inequality over the Long Twentieth Century

Rowena Gray, Siobhan M. O'Keefe, Sarah Quincy and Zachary Ward

No 32545, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: We present new evidence on the long-run trend of occupational task content by race in the United States, 1900-2021. Black workers began the transition to better paid, cognitive-intensive modern jobs at least a generation after white workers; substantial convergence only occurred from 1960 onwards. Longitudinal data suggests that transitions to new task content were racially biased: Black men moved to jobs with lower rewarded task content than white men, conditional on initial task content, though gaps decreased after World War II. Routine-intensive Black workers were less likely to move up into non-routine analytic work compared to white workers in both historical and modern periods. The results suggest that task-displacement shocks, such as automating routine-manual work, widen Black-white inequality

JEL-codes: J24 J62 N31 N32 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024-06
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-his, nep-lma and nep-ure
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