Ongoing Work

We study how new digital technology reshapes vocational training and skill acquisition and its impact on workers' careers. We construct a novel database of legally binding training curricula and changes therein, spanning the near universe of vocational training in Germany over five decades, and link curriculum updates to breakthrough technologies using Natural Language Processing techniques. Our findings reveal that technological advances drive training updates, with curriculum content evolving towards less routine intensive tasks, and greater use of digital and social skills. Using administrative employer-employee data, we show that educational updates help workers adapt to new demands for their expertise, and earn higher wages compared to workers with outdated skills. These findings highlight the role of changes in within-occupational skill supply in meeting evolving labor market demands for non-college educated workers.

We show that the first-time adoption of minimum wages in German industries led to an increase in the share of solo self-employment by up to 8.1 percentage points within a quasi-experimental setting. We explain this result with the cost shock, which led to reduced labor demand and wages for dependent employment, while at the same time creating incentives for independent employment. Our results suggest that dependent employees have been involuntarily pushed into solo self-employment. As a consequence, these workers experience more precarious employment with poorer social security and lower incomes. Such unintended side effects are likely to occur when the minimum wage is set extraordinarily high, especially during an economic downturn. 

This paper examines the extent to which aggregate-level de-routinization can be attributed to firm-level technology adoption during the most recent technological expansion. We use administrative data and a novel firm survey to distinguish frontier technologies from older technologies. We find that adopters of frontier technologies contribute substantially to de-routinization. However, this is driven only by a subset of these firms: large adopters replace routine jobs and less routine-intensive adopters experience faster growth. These scale and composition effects reflect firms’ readiness to adopt and implement frontier technologies. Our results suggest that an acceleration of technology adoption would be associated with faster de-routinization and an increase in between-firm heterogeneity.