The effects of technology and offshoring on changes in employment and task-content of occupations

Semih Akçomak, Suzanne Kok and Hugo Rojas-Romagosa

No 233, CPB Discussion Paper from CPB Netherlands Bureau for Economic Policy Analysis

Abstract: Combining employment data with the British Skill Survey (BSS) –which has comparable within-occupation task data for three waves: 1997, 2001 and 2006– we analyse employment changes between occupations (extensive margin) and within occupations (intensive margin). First, we find that the task-content of occupations (i.e. the intensive margin) has experienced significant changes in the United Kingdom between 1997 and 2006. Second, our econometric results suggest that these intensive margin changes can be explained by technological improvements (SBTC) and unionisation levels, while offshoring has not been a factor explaining how tasks are organized within occupations. Analysing changes at the extensive margin we confirm previous findings in the literature: there has been job polarization for both the UK and the Netherlands, and this job polarization can be explained by both SBTC and offshoring, though SBTC seems to be a more influential factor.

JEL-codes: F16 F23 J21 J23 J24 O33 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2013-02
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-lab and nep-lma
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (13)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.cpb.nl/sites/default/files/publicaties ... sk-content-occup.pdf (application/pdf)

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:cpb:discus:233

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in CPB Discussion Paper from CPB Netherlands Bureau for Economic Policy Analysis Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().