EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

Computers as Stepping Stones? Technological Change and Equality of Labor Market Opportunities

Melanie Arntz, Cäcilia Lipowski, Guido Neidhöfer and Ulrich Zierahn-Weilage

Journal of Labor Economics, 2025, vol. 43, issue 2, 503 - 543

Abstract: This paper analyzes whether technological change improves equality of labor market opportunities by increasing the returns to skills relative to the returns to parental background. We find that in Germany during the 1990s, the introduction of computer technologies improved the access to technology-adopting occupations for workers with low-educated parents and reduced their wage penalty within these occupations. We also show that this significantly contributed to a decline in the overall wage penalty experienced by workers from disadvantaged parental backgrounds over this time period. Competing mechanisms, such as skill-specific labor supply shocks and skill upgrading, do not explain these findings.

Date: 2025
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://dx.doi.org/10.1086/727490 (application/pdf)
http://dx.doi.org/10.1086/727490 (text/html)
Access to the online full text or PDF requires a subscription.

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:ucp:jlabec:doi:10.1086/727490

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Journal of Labor Economics from University of Chicago Press
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Journals Division ().

 
Page updated 2025-04-16
Handle: RePEc:ucp:jlabec:doi:10.1086/727490