Tasks and Technology

The paper presented in this seminar provides new evidence on the effect of innovation on employment and wage outcomes for workers in the US over the period 1980-2016. For this purpose, the paper presented in this seminar develops a task-based view of innovation, using a text analysis approach based on information from patents. This allows to link specific occupations to specific technologies. The speaker then studies the labor market effects of innovation. He finds that employment among low-skill occupations declines in response to innovation. At the same time, high-skill occupations experience significant wage increases, and these are found to be particularly pronounced among professional workers. The results suggest that technological advances play an important role in driving increases in inequality observed over recent decades.