Working papers (in progress)
Training Time, Robots and Technological Unemployment (with Alessio Moro and Michelle Rendall). CEPR DP19343.
We show that labor training requirements for high-skilled occupations increased in the U.S. from 2006 to 2019. These greater training requirements reduce the extent to which workers displaced from shrinking occupations can relocate to expanding (high-skilled) occupations, thus affecting both the equilibrium occupational structure and the unemployment level. We build a quantitative model in which labor is displaced by task-replacing technological change embodied in robots (“tasks shock”) and the extent of occupational switching depends on the destination occupations' training requirements. We find that: (i) task-displacing technological change increases steady-state unemployment, but it reduces unemployment along the transition; (ii) in contrast, a comparable shock to capital embodied technological change produces larger unemployment rates with respect to the tasks shock, both in the transition and the steady state; and (iii) greater training requirements in high-skilled occupations increase steady-state unemployment and affects the occupational structure along the transition, but their effect depends on the size of the technological shock.
The Skill Inside the Task: How AI and Robotics Reshape the Structure of Work . Munich Personal RePEc Archive No. 125404.
We examine how exposure to artificial intelligence (AI) and robotics reshapes the skill composition of occupations. Using O*NET data from 2006 to 2019, we construct indicators tracking over time the importance of seven broad skill categories within each occupation. We link these indicators to task-based measures of technological exposure at the occupational level. We then focus on the effect of AI and robotics in affecting the skill composition of high-, middle- and low-skilled groups of occupations. We find that AI primarily affects high-skill occupations by increasing the importance of Technical and Resource skill and decreasing that of System and Social skills. Robotics instead boosts Technical skills in middle and low-skill jobs and reduces Process skills in low-skilled occupations. Instead, neither AI nor robots affect the importance of Complex Problem skills.
Does Risk Shape Economies? Income Volatility and Structural Change DP20594|CEPR (with Alessio Moro and Andrea Mottola).
We investigate the role of risk in shaping structural transformation. First, we show that in a simple two-sector model, for any given level of GDP, higher microeconomic risk (e.g. volatility of TFP shocks) implies a smaller share of services in consumption, because it induces the representative household to increase savings, whose level determines the structure of consumption due to non-homotheticity. Time-series and cross-sectional U.S. data confirm a negative relationship between different measures of risk and the share of services. This also holds in South-American and Asian countries. As these countries faced lower risk relative to the U.S. during their development, the proposed mechanism can account for part of their premature de-industrialization. Had the U.S. experienced the same GDP volatility before WWII as it did after, its average services share would be 0.023 percentage points higher - roughly 30% of the gap with premature de-industrializers at comparable income levels.
A Theory of Structural Change, Home Production and Leisure STEG WP071 (with Alessio Moro, Francisco Javier Rodríguez Román, Silvio Tunis).
Why do agents consume more services relative to goods as income grows? We present a theory of structural change assuming that a representative household satisfies final needs by means of two home-production functions in time and either goods or services from the market. When calibrating the model to U.S. data, roughly half of structural change is accounted for by technological change allowing services to display a larger time saving than goods in satisfying final needs. Also, even if preferences are homothetic, the calibrated model generates endogenous income effects, which account for the remaining structural change generated by the model.