The Employment Impact of Emerging Digital Technologies: Evidence from US Labor Markets
This paper estimates the exposure of US occupations and industries to emerging digital technologies and their impact on US commuting zone (CZ) employment. Building upon
the natural language processing approach introduced by Prytkova et al. (2024), we estimate the exposure of O⋆NET-SOC occupations and NAICS industries, thereby extending
the open–access "TechXposure" database to the US context. Using this new data source, we apply a shift-share design to instrument the CZ exposure to emerging digital technologies and estimate their employment impact across CZs between 2012 and 2019. We find that digital technologies have an overall positive net impact on US employment. However, the impact varies among different worker demographics: while there is a noticeable decline in employment for core working-age (25–44) and non-college-educated workers in more exposed CZs, we observe employment increases for younger (16–24) and older (45–64) workers, as well as for those with a college education.
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