EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

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
Note: CH DAE LS
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.nber.org/papers/w32545.pdf (application/pdf)
Access to the full text is generally limited to series subscribers, however if the top level domain of the client browser is in a developing country or transition economy free access is provided. More information about subscriptions and free access is available at http://www.nber.org/wwphelp.html. Free access is also available to older working papers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nbr:nberwo:32545

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.nber.org/papers/w32545
The price is Paper copy available by mail.

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc National Bureau of Economic Research, 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138, U.S.A.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by (wpc@nber.org).

 
Page updated 2024-12-10
Handle: RePEc:nbr:nberwo:32545