Individual Consequences of Occupational Decline

The prospect of labour-replacing technologies raises concerns about earnings and employment losses that workers may suffer when demand for their occupations declines. We estimate these losses using a new methodology that measures unanticipated declines in occupational employment, which we apply to panel data on individual workers in Sweden. When we compare workers with very similar initial characteristics, we find that on average those facing occupational decline lost about 2-5 percent of mean cumulative earnings from 1986-2013. But workers at the bottom of their oc-cupations’ initial earnings distributions suffered considerably larger earnings losses. These earnings losses are partly accounted for by reduced time spent in employment, and increased time in unem-ployment and retraining.

A light lunch will be available at 12.00 pm. The presentation starts at 12:15 pm.