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

Melanie Arntz, Cäcilia Lipowski, Guido Neidhöfer () and Ulrich Zierahn-Weilage
Additional contact information
Guido Neidhöfer: ZEW - Leibniz Centre for European Economic Research, Mannheim
Authors registered in the RePEc Author Service: Guido Neidhöfer

No 617, Working Papers from ECINEQ, Society for the Study of Economic Inequality

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, computer-driven technological change 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.

Keywords: Skill-biased technical change; wage inequality; equality of opportunity; intergenerational persistence; parental background; class ceiling (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J21 J23 J24 J31 J62 O33 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 58 pages
Date: 2022-08
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-lma
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.ecineq.org/milano/WP/ECINEQ2022-617.pdf First version, 2022 (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Computers as stepping stones? Technological change and equality of labor market opportunities (2022)
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:inq:inqwps:ecineq2022-617

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from ECINEQ, Society for the Study of Economic Inequality Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Maria Ana Lugo ( this e-mail address is bad, please contact ).