This Job Is 'Getting Old:' Measuring Changes in Job Opportunities Using Occupational Age Structure

David Autor and David Dorn

No 3970, IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)

Abstract: High- and low-wage occupations are expanding rapidly relative to middle-wage occupations in both the U.S. and the E.U. We study the reallocation of workers from middle-skill occupations towards the tails of the occupational skill distribution by analyzing changes in age structure within and across occupations. Because occupations typically expand by hiring young workers and contract by curtailing such hiring, we posit that growing occupations will get younger while shrinking occupations will 'get old.' After verifying this proposition, we apply this observation to local labor markets in the U.S. to test whether markets that were specialized in middle-skilled occupations in 1980 saw a differential movement of both older and younger workers into occupations at the tails of the skill distribution over the subsequent 25 years. Consistent with aggregate trends, employment in initially middle-skill-intensive labor markets hollowed-out between 1980 and 2005. Employment losses among non-college workers in the middle of the occupational skill distribution were almost entirely countered by employment growth in lower-tail occupations. For college workers, employment losses at the middle were offset in roughly equal measures by gains in the upper- and lower-tails of the occupational skill distribution. But gains at the upper-tail were almost entirely limited to young college workers. Consequently, older college workers are increasingly found in lower-skill, lower-paying occupations.

Keywords: job polarization; occupational structure; age structure; local labor markets; technical change (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: E24 J11 J21 J24 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 15 pages
Date: 2009-01
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-age, nep-bec, nep-lab and nep-ltv
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (179)

Published - published in: American Economic Review, Papers & Proceedings, 2009, 99 (2), 45-51

Downloads: (external link)
https://docs.iza.org/dp3970.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: This Job Is "Getting Old": Measuring Changes in Job Opportunities Using Occupational Age Structure (2009)
Working Paper: This Job is 'Getting Old:' Measuring Changes in Job Opportunities Using Occupational Age Structure (2009)
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:iza:izadps:dp3970

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
IZA, Margard Ody, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA) IZA, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Holger Hinte ().