EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

Skills, Tasks and Technologies: Implications for Employment and Earnings

Daron Acemoglu and David Autor

No 16082, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: A central organizing framework of the voluminous recent literature studying changes in the returns to skills and the evolution of earnings inequality is what we refer to as the canonical model, which elegantly and powerfully operationalizes the supply and demand for skills by assuming two distinct skill groups that perform two different and imperfectly substitutable tasks or produce two imperfectly substitutable goods. Technology is assumed to take a factor-augmenting form, which, by complementing either high or low skill workers, can generate skill biased demand shifts. In this paper, we argue that despite its notable successes, the canonical model is largely silent on a number of central empirical developments of the last three decades, including: (1) significant declines in real wages of low skill workers, particularly low skill males; (2) non-monotone changes in wages at different parts of the earnings distribution during different decades; (3) broad-based increases in employment in high skill and low skill occupations relative to middle skilled occupations (i.e., job 'polarization'); (4) rapid diffusion of new technologies that directly substitute capital for labor in tasks previously performed by moderately-skilled workers; and (5) expanding offshoring opportunities, enabled by technology, which allow foreign labor to substitute for domestic workers in specific tasks. Motivated by these patterns, we argue that it is valuable to consider a richer framework for analyzing how recent changes in the earnings and employment distribution in the United States and other advanced economies are shaped by the interactions among worker skills, job tasks, evolving technologies, and shifting trading opportunities. We propose a tractable task-based model in which the assignment of skills to tasks is endogenous and technical change may involve the substitution of machines for certain tasks previously performed by labor. We further consider how the evolution of technology in this task-based setting may be endogenized. We show how such a framework can be used to interpret several central recent trends, and we also suggest further directions for empirical exploration.

JEL-codes: J20 J23 J24 J30 O31 O33 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2010-06
Note: LS
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (157)

Published as -(With David Autor) Skills, Tasks and Technologies: Implications for Employment and Earnings, Handbook of Labor Economics, volume 4.

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.nber.org/papers/w16082.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Chapter: Skills, Tasks and Technologies: Implications for Employment and Earnings (2011) Downloads
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:nbr:nberwo:16082

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.nber.org/papers/w16082

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc National Bureau of Economic Research, 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138, U.S.A.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().

 
Page updated 2025-03-22
Handle: RePEc:nbr:nberwo:16082