The "End of Men" and Rise of Women in the High-Skilled Labor Market
by Guido Matias Cortes, Nir Jaimovich, Henry E. Siu
Abstract:
We document a new finding regarding changes in labor market outcomes for men and women in the US. Since 1980, conditional on being a college-educated man, the probability of working in a cognitive/high-wage occupation has fallen. This contrasts starkly with the experience for college-educated women: their probability of working in these occupations rose, despite a much larger increase in the supply of educated women relative to men. We consider these facts in light of a general neoclassical model of the labor market. One key channel capable of rationalizing these findings is a greater increase in the demand for female-oriented skills in cognitive/high-wage occupations relative to other occupations. Using occupation-level data, we find evidence that this relative increase in the demand for female skills is due to an increasing importance of social skills within such occupations. Evidence from both male and female wages is also indicative of an increase in the demand for social skills.
More at NBER.
From a new NBER working paper, "Artificial Intelligence, Automation and Work," by Daron Acemoglu and Pascual Restrepo.
Abstract:
We summarize a framework for the study of the implications of automation and AI on the demand for labor, wages, and employment. Our task-based framework emphasizes the displacement effect that automation creates as machines and AI replace labor in tasks that it used to perform. This displacement effect tends to reduce the demand for labor and wages. But it is counteracted by a productivity effect, resulting from the cost savings generated by automation, which increase the demand for labor in non-automated tasks. The productivity effect is complemented by additional capital accumulation and the deepening of automation (improvements of existing machinery), both of which further increase the demand for labor. These countervailing effects are incomplete. Even when they are strong, automation increases output per worker more than wages and reduce the share of labor in national income. The more powerful countervailing force against automation is the creation of new labor-intensive tasks, which reinstates labor in new activities and tends to increase the labor share to counterbalance the impact of automation. Our framework also highlights the constraints and imperfections that slow down the adjustment of the economy and the labor market to automation and weaken the resulting productivity gains from this transformation: a mismatch between the skill requirements of new technologies, and the possibility that automation is being introduced at an excessive rate, possibly at the expense of other productivity-enhancing technologies.
From the new NBER working paper by Justin Caron, Thibault Fally and James Markusen, "Per Capita Income and the Demand for Skills,"
Almost all of the literature about the growth of income inequality and the relationship between skilled and unskilled wages approaches the issue from the production side of general equilibrium (skill-biased technical change, international trade). Here, we add a role for income-dependent demand interacted with factor intensities in production. We explore how income growth and trade liberalization influence the demand for skilled labor when preferences are non-homothetic and income-elastic goods are more intensive in skilled labor, an empirical regularity documented in Caron, Fally and Markusen (2014). In one experiment, counterfactual simulations show that sector neutral productivity growth, which generates shifts in consumption towards skill-intensive goods, leads to significant increases in the skill premium: in developing countries, a one percent increase in productivity leads to a 0.1 to 0.25 percent increase in the skill premium. In several countries, including China and India, simulations suggest that the historical growth experienced in the last 25 years may have led to an increase in the skill premium of more than 10%. In a second experiment, we show that trade cost reductions generate quantitatively very different outcomes once we account for non- homothetic preferences. These imply substantially less predicted net factor content of trade and allow for a shift in consumption patterns caused by trade-induced income growth. Overall, the negative effect of trade cost reductions on the skill premium predicted for developing countries under homothetic preferences (Stolper-Samuelson) is strongly mitigated, and sometimes reversed.
Or to put in other words:
We provide a quantitative assessment of a simple yet overlooked mechanism: growth in income increasingly shifts consumption patterns towards goods and services that require relatively more skilled labor in their production.
Read more here. (Gated)
