This graduate course in labour economics presents an in-depth overview of recent research in labour economics focussing on inequality, technological change, globalization, worker power, and monopsony. The course stresses the most recent theories as well as recent advances in empirical research designs.
This paper estimates the impact of firm-level investments in automation technologies on worker-level outcomes. It finds that automation increases the probability of incumbent workers separating from their employers, in line with recent task-based models of automation. It shows that incumbent workers experience a 5-year cumulative wage income loss of 9 percent of one year’s earnings on average, driven by decreases in days worked. These adverse impacts of automation are larger in smaller firms, and for older and less-educated workers. By contrast, no such losses are found for firms’ investments in computers.
This paper uses a Dutch firm-level survey on automation expenditures linked to administrative records covering the universe of firms in the Netherlands to consider firm-level automation over 2000–2016. It shows that net employment at firms falls after investments in automation technology. Importantly, this effect arises among both manufacturing and nonmanufacturing firms, indicating that this is not specific to technologies like robotics.
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.