job polarization

This paper uses historical labour market data for Belgium for the period 1846–2011 to illustrate how the employment impacts of the ongoing Digital Revolution after 1980 compare to those of the Second Industrial Revolution before 1980. In particular, it shows that labour markets after 1980 are not uniquely characterized by exceptionally high labour market turbulence but by the nature of changes in the composition of jobs, namely a process of job polarization.

This paper documents the pervasiveness of job polarization in 16 Western European countries over the period 1993–2010. It then develops and estimates a framework to explain job polarization using routine-biased technological change and offshoring. This model can explain much of both total job polarization and the split into within-industry and between-industry components.

This paper documents the pervasiveness of job polarization across 16 European countries. It also discusses several hypotheses about the reasons for job polarization. First, the “routinization” hypothesis (first put forward by Autor, Levy, and Murnane 2003) suggests that technological progress is to replace “routine” labor which tends to be clerical and craft jobs in the middle of the wage distribution. Second, there is the view that globalization is an important source of change in the job structure in the richest countries. Third, the rise in the share of income going to the rich may have led to an increase in demand for low-skill workers whose employment increasingly consists of providing services to the rich.

This paper shows that the United Kingdom since 1975 has exhibited a pattern of job polarization with rises in employment shares in the highest- and lowest-wage occupations. It argues that this is not entirely consistent with the idea of skill-biased technical change as a hypothesis about the impact of technology on the labor market. Instead, it shows that the “routinization” hypothesis recently proposed by Autor, Levy, and Murnane (2003) is a better explanation of job polarization.