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Title: Inequality and Specialization: The Growth of Low-Skill Service Jobs in the United States
Citation Type: Working Paper
Publication Year: 2009
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Abstract: After a decade in which wages and employment fell precipitously in low-skill occupations andexpanded in high-skill occupations, the shape of U.S. earnings and job growth sharply polarized inthe 1990s. Employment shares and relative earnings rose in both low and high-skill jobs, leading toa distinct U-shaped relationship between skill levels and employment and wage growth. This paperanalyzes the sources of the changing shape of the lower-tail of the U.S. wage and employmentdistributions. A rst contribution is to document a hitherto unknown fact: the twisting of thelower tail is substantially accounted for by a single proximate cause rising employment and wagesin low-education, in-person service occupations. We study the determinants of this rise at thelevel of local labor markets over the period of 1950 through 2005. Our approach is rooted in amodel of changing task specialization in which routineclerical and production tasks are displacedby automation. We nd that in labor markets that were initially specialized in routine-intensiveoccupations, employment and wages polarized after 1980, with growing employment and earningsin both high-skill occupations and low-skill service jobs.
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Authors: Dorn, David; Autor, David H.
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Institution: MIT Department of Economics
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Data Collections: IPUMS USA
Topics: Labor Force and Occupational Structure
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