TY  - JOUR
AU  - Autor,David H.
AU  - Dorn,David
TI  - The Growth of Low Skill Service Jobs and the Polarization of the U.S. Labor Market
JF  - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series
VL  - No. 15150
PY  - 2009
Y2  - July 2009
UR  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w15150
L1  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w15150.pdf
N1  - Author contact info:
David Autor
Department of Economics
MIT, E52-371
50 Memorial Drive
Cambridge, MA 02142-1347
Tel: 617/258-7698
Fax: 617/253-1330
E-Mail: dautor@mit.edu

David Dorn
David Dorn
CEMFI
Casado del Alisal 5
28014 Madrid
Spain
Tel: +34 914290551
Fax: +34 914291056
E-Mail: dorn@cemfi.es
AB  - We offer a unified explanation and empirical analysis of the polarization of U.S. employment and wages between 1980 and 2005, and the concurrent growth of low skill service occupations. We attribute polarization to the interaction between consumer preferences, which favor variety over specialization, and the falling cost of automating routine, codifiable job tasks. Applying a spatial equilibrium model, we derive, test, and confirm four implications of this hypothesis. Local labor markets that were specialized in routine activities differentially adopted information technology, reallocated low skill labor into service occupations (employment polarization), experienced earnings growth at the tails of the distribution (wage polarization), and received inflows of skilled labor.
ER  -