Occupational Exposure to Capital-Embodied Technical Change
Abstract/Contents
- Abstract
- Factor-biased technical change is at the core of the US labor market dynamics in the post-war era. Concurrently, workers' occupations have become a key dimension for the anatomy of labor reallocation and inequality. This paper furthers our understanding of the heterogeneity in factor-biased technical change across occupations by providing the first direct measures of capital-embodied technical change (CETC) as well as of the elasticity of substitution between labor and capital at the occupational level. We nd that CETC and capital-labor ratios vary substantially across occupations and over time, but it is the heterogeneity in the elasticity of substitution that fuels differences in workers' exposure to technical change and ultimately sets the direction of the labor reallocation triggered by CETC. We evaluate the impact of CETC in a general equilibrium model of endogenous sorting of workers across occupations of different CETC and substitutability between capital and labor. CETC explains 87% of labor reallocation in the US between 1984 and 2015. In an economy with a common elasticity of substitution between capital and labor, measured differences in CETC can only explain 14.5% of the observed labor reallocation.
Description
| Type of resource | text |
|---|---|
| Date created | August 17, 2021 |
Creators/Contributors
| Author | Caunedo, Julieta |
|---|---|
| Author | Jaume, David |
| Author | Keller, Elisa |
| Organizer of meeting | Auclert, Adrien |
| Organizer of meeting | Mitman, Kurt |
| Organizer of meeting | Tonetti, Christopher |
| Organizer of meeting | Wong, Arlene |
Subjects
| Subject | economics |
|---|---|
| Genre | Text |
| Genre | Working paper |
| Genre | Grey literature |
Bibliographic information
Access conditions
- Use and reproduction
- User agrees that, where applicable, content will not be used to identify or to otherwise infringe the privacy or confidentiality rights of individuals. Content distributed via the Stanford Digital Repository may be subject to additional license and use restrictions applied by the depositor.
- License
- This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license (CC BY).
Preferred citation
- Preferred citation
- Caunedo, J., Jaume, D., and Keller, E. (2022). Occupational Exposure to Capital-Embodied Technical Change. Stanford Digital Repository. Available at https://purl.stanford.edu/vk137tr5262
Collection
SITE Conference 2021
View other items in this collection in SearchWorksContact information
- Contact
- siteworkshop@stanford.edu
Also listed in
Loading usage metrics...