Publications
Selected Publications
Computers as Stepping Stones? Technological Change and Equality of Labor Market Opportunities
joint with Melanie Arntz, Guido Neidhöfer, and Cäcilia Lipowski, Journal of Labor Economics, forthcoming.
This paper analyzes whether technological change improves equality of labor market opportunities by increasing the returns to skills relative to the returns to parental background. We find that in Germany during the 1990s, the introduction of computer technologies improved the access to technology-adopting occupations for workers with low-educated parents, and reduced their wage penalty within these occupations. We also show that this significantly contributed to a decline in the overall wage penalty experienced by workers from disadvantaged parental backgrounds over this time period. Competing mechanisms, such as skill-specific labor supply shocks and skill-upgrading, do not explain these findings.
Wage Penalty by Parental Background and Technological Change
Racing With or Against the Machine? Evidence on the Role of Trade in Europe
joint with Terry Gregory and Anna Salomons, Journal of the European Economic Association, 20(2), 869-906, 2022.
Digital technologies displace labor from routine tasks, raising concerns that labor is racing against the machine. We develop an empirically tractable task-based framework to estimate the aggregate employment effects of routine-replacing technological change (RRTC), along with the labor and product demand channels through which this aggregate effect comes about, focusing on the role of inter-regional trade. While RRTC has indeed had strong displacement effects in Europe between 1999 and 2010, it has simultaneously created new jobs through increased product demand, resulting in net employment growth. However, the distribution of gains from technological progress matters for its job-creating potential.
Predicted employment change in Europe (27 countries) between 1999 and 2010 in millions of jobs.
When the Minimum Wage Really Bites Hard: The Negative Spillover Effect on High-Skilled Workers
joint with Terry Gregory, Journal of Public Economics, 206, 1-32 [104582], 2022.
Minimum wage levels are rising around the globe. To shed more light on the possible unintended side effects of higher wage floors, we study the impact of a minimum wage introduction on wages and employment in a quasi-experimental setting where the minimum wage is set extraordinarily high during an economic downturn. We identify treatment effects along different wage and skill groups and find positive wage and employment spillover effects for medium-skilled workers with salaries just above the minimum wage. More striking, we find negative wage and employment effects for high-skilled workers who are further up the wage distribution, followed by reduced returns to skills and industry skill supply. We explain these adjustments with a substitution-scale model that predicts negative spillover effects whenever labor-labor substitutions toward high-skilled workers are overcompensated by an overall decline in industry employment. Even though we focus on a specialized industry, we lay out the general conditions under which such unfavorable adjustments may occur in other contexts.
Minimum wage effects on the unconditional real daily wage distribution (German roofing industry, 1994-2008)
Further Publications in Refereed Journals
Arntz, M.; Gregory, T.; Zierahn, U. (2017): Revisiting the Risk of Automation, Economics Letters, 159, 157-160.
Zierahn, U. (2013): Agglomeration, Congestion, and Regional Unemployment Disparities, Annals of Regional Science, 51(2), 435-457.
Tolciu, A.; Zierahn, U. (2012): Women and work: what role do social norms play?, International Review of Applied Economics, 26 (6), 711-733.
Zierahn, U. (2012): The importance of spatial autocorrelation for regional employment growth in Germany, Review of Regional Research, 32 (1), 19-43.
Schröer, S.; Zierahn, U. (2010): Die deutschen Ausbauziele für erneuerbare Energien: Eine Effizienzanalyse, Zeitschrift für Umweltpolitik & Umweltrecht, 33 (1), 83-108.
Books and Chapters
Arntz, M., Gregory, T., Zierahn, U. T. (2020): Digitization and the Future of Work: Macroeconomic Consequences. In K. F. Zimmermann (Ed.), Handbook of Labor, Human Resources and Population Economics, Springer.
Arnold, D.; Arntz, M.; Gregory, T.; Steffes, S.; Zierahn, U. (2018): No need for automation angst, but automation policies, in: Neufeind, M.; OReilly, J.; Ranft, F. (eds.): Work in the Digital Age, London, New York.
Zierahn, U. (2012): Regional Labor Market Disparities – A New Economic Geography Perspective, Dissertation, University of Kassel.
Non-Refereed Journals
Arntz, M., Gregory, T., Zierahn, U. (2020). Digitalisierung und die Zukunft der Arbeit. Wirtschaftsdienst, 100(1), 41-47.
Meindl, B., Ott, I., Zierahn, U. T. (2019). Binary Patent Classification Methods for Few Annotated Samples. In Proceedings of The 1st Workshop on Patent Text Mining and Semantic Technologies (PatentSemTech 2019) (pp. 13-17).
Janssen, S.; Leber, U.; Arntz, M.; Gregory, T.; Zierahn, U. (2018), Betriebe und Arbeitswelt 4.0: Mit Investitionen in die Digitalisierung steigt auch die Weiterbildung, IAB-Kurzbericht 26/2018, 1-8.
Stettes, O.; Arntz, M.; Gregory, T.; Zierahn, U.; Dengler, K.; Veit, D.; Eichhorst, W.; und Rinne, U. (2017): Arbeitswelt 4.0: Wohlstandszuwachs oder Ungleichheit und Arbeitsplatzverlust – was bringt die Digitalisierung?, ifo Schnelldienst 7, S. 3-18.
Arntz, M.; Gregory, T.; Matthes, B.; Lehmer, F.; Zierahn, U. (2016): Arbeitswelt 4.0 – Stand der Digitalisierung in Deutschland: Dienstleister haben die Nase vorn, IAB-Kurzbericht 22, S. 1-8.
Arnold, D.; Arntz, M.; Gregory, T.; Steffes, S.; Zierahn, U. (2016): Herausforderungen der Digitalisierung für die Zukunft der Arbeitswelt, ZEW policy brief Nr. 16-08, Mannheim.
Wilke, C. B.; Zierahn, U.; Breiholz, H. (2014): Möglichkeiten zur Analyse des privaten Versicherungsschutzes anhand der Einkommens- und Verbrauchsstichprobe, Wirtschaft und Statistik 2014 (Februar), S. 134-142.
Zierahn, U. (2010): Konjunkturschlaglicht: Bundesländer in der Krise, Wirtschaftsdienst 90 (4), S. 275-276.
Comtesse, D.; Vöpel, H.; Zierahn, U. (2009): Altersvorsorge und Konsumverhalten von Frauen in Deutschland, Wirtschaftsdienst 89 (9), S. 620-627.
Zierahn, U. (2008): Arbeitsmarktreformen in Schweden, Wirtschaftsdienst 88 (1), S. 681-687.