Explaining Job Polarization: The Role of Heterogeneity in Capital Intensity
2017/01/16
研討會日期 : 2017-01-16
時間 : 14:30
主講人 : Ms. Wan-Jung Cheng
主持人 : Professor Chu-An Liu
地點 : Conference Room B110
演講者簡介 : Ms. Cheng will receive her Ph.D. in Economics from Washington University in St. Louis in 2017. Her research fields are Growth and Development, Macro Labor, Macroeconomics. She is applying for a position of the Institute of Economics, Academia Sinica now.
演講摘要 : This paper proposes a new perspective to explain job polarization over the past few decades. Consisting of employment and wage polarization, job polarization is a widely documented phenomenon that involves the decline in both the employment shares and relative wages of middle-skill occupations with respect to high- and low-skill occupations. I present empirical evidence and build a task-based model demonstrating that job polarization stems from the interaction of the decrease in the relative price of capital goods, heterogeneity in job task production, and the complementarity of job tasks in final goods production. First, I construct a measure of occupation-level capital intensities and document that the tasks of middle-skill workers tend to be more capital intensive. Second, I build a task-based model with two goods sectors and three job tasks, where the job task production differs in capital intensity and how a worker’s skill is utilized. The model shows that when there is a decrease in the price of capital goods, employment shifts away from capital-intensive tasks, and the relative wages are driven down, implying that decreasing price of capital goods predicts job polarization. A quantitative analysis suggests that the model can account for approximately one-third to one-half of the employment polarization and approximately half of the upper tail of the wage polarization in the U.S. between 1980 and 2010.
