Work of the Past, Work of the Future

David Autor

No 25588, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: Labor markets in U.S. cities today are vastly more educated and skill-intensive than they were five decades ago. Yet, urban non-college workers perform substantially less skilled work than decades earlier. This deskilling reflects the joint effects of automation and international trade, which have eliminated the bulk of non-college production, administrative support, and clerical jobs, yielding a disproportionate polarization of urban labor markets. The unwinding of the urban non-college occupational skill gradient has, I argue, abetted a secular fall in real non-college wages by: (1) shunting non-college workers out of specialized middle-skill occupations into low-wage occupations that require only generic skills; (2) diminishing the set of non-college workers that hold middle-skill jobs in high-wage cities; and (3) attenuating, to a startling degree, the steep urban wage premium for non-college workers that prevailed in earlier decades. Changes in the nature of work—many of which are technological in origin—have been more disruptive and less beneficial for non-college than college workers.

JEL-codes: J23 J24 J31 J6 O33 R12 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019-02
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-lma, nep-ltv and nep-tid
Note: LS
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (206)

Published as David H. Autor, 2019. "Work of the Past, Work of the Future," AEA Papers and Proceedings, vol 109, pages 1-32.

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.nber.org/papers/w25588.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Work of the Past, Work of the Future (2019)
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:25588

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.nber.org/papers/w25588

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 ().