Why do regions with growing populations in the United States suffer from rising wage inequality? This paper provides a novel explanation by showing the differential effects of directed technological change on worker mobility, employment and wages between local labour markets. The identification strategy is twofold: first, I construct a novel measure of cognitive-biased technological change using detailed and time-varying occupation data. Second, I use an industry shift-share design to estimate the causal effects of technology shocks on the labour market. The results show that low-skilled and high-skilled working-age populations increase in local labour markets with higher exposure to cognitive-biased technological change. Despite the labour-augmenting effects on low-skilled workers, their relative wages and employment shares decline in more exposed labour markets while the college wage premium increases. The crowding-out of low-skilled workers and the rise in the college wage premium are most pronounced within non-routine cognitive occupations.

Every fifth worker changes their occupation every year, whereas the mechanisms behind the observed mobility of workers still need to be fully understood. This paper studies the relationship between work-hour instability and occupational mobility in the U.S. labour market. I use the longitudinal dimension of the Current Population Survey (CPS) to measure workers’ intra-year work-hour variation and analyse their mobility through a balanced occupation panel. The results show that being in the highest quartile of work-hour variation increases the probability of changing occupations by 0.33% for men and 0.81% for women compared to an average monthly mobility rate of 1.71%. An analysis of the marginal effects across different household compositions suggests that the substantial gender gap is related to intra-household specialisation and the male breadwinner role. The second part of this study shows that only workers with highly volatile work hours sort themselves into more stable occupations.

Women are significantly under-represented among innovation leaders, including startup founders, patent inventors and venture capitalists. This raises the question if technological change is by nature gender-biased and, if so, how it affects the evolution of the labour market. Our pre-analysis finds that technological change in the twenty-first century has degraded female work values such as cooperation, social orientation and integrity. At the same time, male-dominated occupations experienced the most significant increases in labour demand in general and demand for cognitive skills specifically. In this project, we investigate how the gender-biased effects of technological progress on different occupations are related to the occupational resorting of women and the gender wage gap in the U.S. labour market.

The Great Financial Crisis and the COVID-19 pandemic had an essential impact on the U.S. labour market, causing a reallocation of workers with different skills across occupations. In this project, we investigate the similarities and differences in directed worker mobility during the two recent crises. We use a balanced panel of 430 occupations to observe occupational transitions in the Current Population Survey (CPS) and a measure of task distance to analyse if workers moved systematically to specific types of occupations in response to the two labour market shocks. 

In this project, we exploit different European datasets to investigate the reintegration of former convicts into the legal labour market. We put particular emphasis on investigating the effects of prison work and related wages during incarceration on post-release outcomes such as unemployment duration, wages and recidivism. 

The recent evolution of employment indicates that the growth in the demand for cognitive ability in the U.S. labour market has flattened since the 2000s. This paper sheds light on this puzzle using updated O*NET ability data to measure cognitive and manual task intensity changes within occupations between 2008 and 2017. Non-routine cognitive and high-wage occupations increased while routine-intensive and low-wage occupations decreased in cognitive intensity. At the same time, the decline in manual intensity is more substantial in non-routine-cognitive and high-wage occupations. The differential task demand changes between occupations imply heterogeneous effects on the segmented labour market. Young men, workers with college degrees and workers in STEM occupations experienced the most substantial increase in the demand for cognitive ability. The effects of task changes within occupations account for an 8.3% increase in the return to cognitive task intensity between 2008 and 2017.