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Title: Task Inequality and Racial Mobility over the Long Twentieth Century

Citation Type: Miscellaneous

Publication Year: 2023

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Abstract: We present a new series on the trend of occupational task content between 1900 and 2020. We find that Black workers were concentrated in tasks that declined in demand over the last 120 years, while white workers were concentrated in tasks that increased in demand. We then use longitudinal data to show that transitions across occupational task content were racially biased, where Black workers ended up in occupations with lower-rewarded task content than their white counterparts. This bias also existed across generations in pre-World War II data, but not for post-World War II years. These results suggest that a given task-displacing technological shock will impact Black-white inequality within one generation, but not across generations.

Url: https://economics.yale.edu/sites/default/files/2023-02/Task Inequality and Racial Mobility over the Long Twentieth Century_feb23.pdf

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Authors: Gray, Rowena; O'Keefe, Siobhan; Quincy, Sarah; Ward, Zachary

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Data Collections: IPUMS USA, IPUMS USA - Ancestry Full Count Data

Topics: Labor Force and Occupational Structure, Race and Ethnicity

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