7th CESifo Monthly Webinar on Labor Economics

Scientific organizer: Professor Gordon B. Dahl

The CESifo Webinars on Labor Economics were launched after the very first Area Conference of the Labor Economics Area of the CESifo Research Network was canceled due to COVID-19. In order to build and connect a network of researchers in labor economics on both sides of the Atlantic, the webinars will run on a monthly basis with different speakers for each event. 

Lectures by David Autor (MIT) and Aline Bütikofer (Norwegian School of Economics)

David Autor will talk on New Frontiers: The Origins and Content of New Work, 1940-2018 (co-authors Anna Salomons and Bryan Seegmiller).

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 (`augmentation') or market size expands, while conversely, employment contracts in occupations where innovations substitute for labor inputs (`automation'). 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 augmentation 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.

Aline Bütikofer will talk on Building Bridges and Widening Gaps (co-authors Katrine V. Løken and Alexander Willén).

We study the labor market effects of gaining access to a larger labor market by exploiting the opening of the Øresund bridge, which connects a medium-sized city in Sweden to the capital city of Denmark. Using unique cross-country matched registry data that allow us to follow individuals across the border, we show that the bridge led to a substantial increase in the cross-country commuting behavior of Swedish residents. This effect translates into a 13% increase in the average wage of Swedish residents eight years after the bridge opened. However, these wage gains are unevenly distributed: the effect is largest for high-educated men and smallest for low-educated women. Thus, the wage gains come at the cost of increased income inequality and a widening of the gender wage gap, both within and across households. These inequality effects are driven not only by differences in the propensity to commute, but also by educational specialization.

General Information on the Webinar

The webinar will begin at 6pm (CEST) on Thursday, 10 June 2021. Each speaker will give a 35 minute presentation and participants will then have the opportunity to pose questions.  Questions will also be encouraged during the lectures.