What the History of (New) Jobs Can Tell Us About the Impact of Technological Change on Employment

William Skoglund, Jakob Molinder and Kerstin Enflo

No 21896, CEPR Discussion Papers from Centre for Economic Policy Research

Abstract: There is currently widespread concern that rapid technological change will fundamentally change the nature of work. In this paper we show that, despite 140 years of technological change, more than 70 percent of employment today is located in occupations whose core economic functions already existed in the late nineteenth century. Full-count Swedish census and administrative data from 1880 to 2019, harmonized to five-digit HISCO, let us observe how many people work in each occupation. This yields far greater occupational persistence than when new work is inferred from the appearance of new job titles. To characterize the new work that does emerge, we distinguish Schumpeterian occupations, tied directly to new technology, from Smithian occupations, arising from a deeper division of labor. Most new work is Smithian. Schumpeterian occupations, on the other hand, remain small and unstable, with an increasingly older workforce, and it is specialization, not technology or newness, that commands the largest earnings premium. Technology sustains employment less by expanding technological occupations than by creating the scale on which specialization depends.

Keywords: Technological change; HISCO; Occupational structure; Long-run trends (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J16 J24 N33 N34 O33 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2026-09
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://cepr.org/publications/DP21896 (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:cpr:ceprdp:21896

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
https://cepr.org/publications/DP21896

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in CEPR Discussion Papers from Centre for Economic Policy Research 33 Great Sutton Street, London EC1V 0DX, UK.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by CEPR ().