New Frontiers: The Origins and Content of New Work, 1940-2018
Abstract:
Recent theory stresses the role of new job types (‘new work’) in counterbalancing the erosive effect of task-displacing automation on labor demand. We study new work by building a novel nearly century-long inventory of new job titles linked to United States Census microdata. We estimate that the majority of contemporary employment is found in new job tasks added since 1940 but that the locus of new task creation has shifted---from middle-paid production and clerical occupations in the first four post-WWII decades, to high-paid professional and, secondarily, low-paid services since 1980. We hypothesize that new tasks emerge in occupations where new innovations complement their outputs or market size expands, while conversely, employment contracts in occupations where innovations substitute for labor inputs. Leveraging a measure of occupational innovation exposure built from a century of patent data and harnessing occupational demand shifts stemming from trade and demographic shocks, we show that innovation predicts the growth of new occupational tasks and that new occupational tasks predict employment growth. We demonstrate that the forces of new task creation and task automation, as codified in patents, are positively correlated at the level of occupations and yet have opposing consequences for employment and wage growth.
Bio:
David Autor is a Professor and Associate Department Head of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Department of Economics. He is also a Faculty Research Associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research and Editor in Chief of the Journal of Economic Perspectives (published by the American Economic Association), and has served on the Board of Editors at the American Economic Journal: Applied Economics and the Journal of Labor Economics.
Professor Autor received a B.A. in Psychology from Tufts University in 1989 and a Ph.D. in Public Policy at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government in 1999. His current fields of specialization include human capital and earnings inequality, labor market impacts of technological change and globalization, disability insurance and labor supply, and temporary help and other intermediated work arrangements.