Disappearing Routine Jobs: Who, How, and Why?

Guido Matias Cortes, Nir Jaimovich and Henry Siu

No 22918, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: We study the deterioration of employment in middle-wage, routine occupations in the United States in the last 35 years. The decline is primarily driven by changes in the propensity to work in routine jobs for individuals from a small set of demographic groups. These same groups account for a substantial fraction of both the increase in non-employment and employment in low-wage, non-routine manual occupations observed during the same time period. We analyze a general neoclassical model of the labor market featuring endogenous participation and occupation choice. We show that in response to an increase in automation technology, the model embodies an important tradeoff between reallocating employment across occupations and reallocation of workers towards non-employment. Quantitatively, we find that advances in automation technology on their own account for a relatively small portion of the joint decline in routine employment and associated rise in non-routine manual employment and non-employment.

JEL-codes: E0 J0 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2016-12
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-his, nep-lab, nep-mac and nep-pay
Note: EFG LS
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (17)

Published as Guido Matias Cortes & Nir Jaimovich & Henry E. Siu, 2017. "Disappearing Routine Jobs: Who, How, and Why?," Journal of Monetary Economics, .

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