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Work of the Past, Work of the Future
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US cities today are vastly more educated and skill-intensive than they were five decades ago. Yet, urban non-college workers perform substantially less skilled jobs than decades earlier. This deskilling reflects the joint effects of automation and, secondarily, rising international trade, which have eliminated the bulk of non-college production, administrative support, and clerical jobs, yielding a disproportionate polarization of urban labor markets. The unwinding of the urban non-college occupational skill gradient has, I argue, abetted a secular fall in real non-college wages by: (1) shunting non-college workers out of specialized middle-skill occupations into low-wage occupations that require only generic skills; (2) diminishing the set of non-college workers that hold middle-skill jobs in high-wage cities; and (3) attenuating, to a startling degree, the steep urban wage premium for non-college workers that prevailed in earlier decades. Changes in the nature of work--many of which are technological in origin--have been more disruptive and less beneficial for non-college than college workers.
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“Some of these technologies, like personal computers, have been complementary mostly to educated workers (63, 64)”
From The impact of generative artificial intelligence on socioeconomic inequalities and policy making (2024) · cites this paper as [64]
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- Autor David, 2019, The Inversion of the Rural-Urban Age Gradient in the United States, 1950
- Costa Dora L, 2000, Changes in the Locational Choice of the College Educated, 1940
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Metadata
- Authors
- Autor, D. H.
- Affiliations
- National Bureau of Economic Research (US)
- Corresponding author
- Autor, David H.
- ORCID
- Autor, David H.
- Venue
- AEA Papers and Proceedings
- Publisher
- American Economic Association
- Published
- 2019-05-01
- Volume
- 109
- Pages
- 1-32
- ISSN
- 2574-0768 (ISSN-L)
- 2574-0776
- OpenAlex
- W2917662199
- Cited by
- 435
- References
- 42
- Citations by year
- 2026: 63 · 2025: 79 · 2024: 79 · 2023: 43 · 2022: 53 · 2021: 56 · 2020: 48 · 2019: 11
- FWCI
- 52.43
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- green
- hdl.handle.net
- Licence
- cc-by-nc
- Locations
- AEA Papers and Proceedings (publishedVersion)
- RePEc: Research Papers in Economics (submittedVersion)
- DSpace@MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) (submittedVersion, cc-by-nc)
- Topics
- Social Sciences › Economics, Econometrics and Finance › Economics and Econometrics › Labor market dynamics and wage inequality
- Social Sciences › Economics, Econometrics and Finance › Economics and Econometrics › Agglomeration and Urban Systems
- Social Sciences › Sociology and Political Science › Digital Economy and Work Transformation
- Keywords
- deskilling, automation, international trade, urban wage premium, low-wage employment, technological change
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