Date of Completion

7-14-2016

Embargo Period

7-12-2026

Keywords

Wages, Task Content, Skills, Human Capital, Skill Biased Technical Change, Occupations, Labor Dynamics, Employment Transitions

Major Advisor

Kenneth A. Couch

Associate Advisor

Delia Furtado

Associate Advisor

Subhash Ray

Field of Study

Economics

Degree

Doctor of Philosophy

Open Access

Campus Access

Abstract

This analysis explores the labor market dynamic of skill biased technical change through three distinct but closely related analyses. The first two chapters, develop a novel methodology for constructing a panel of occupational task content that consists of incumbent-updated survey data from O*NET. In the first chapter, I exploit variation in task content within an occupations over time to explore the impact of changing job requirements (driven by technology) on the wages of incumbent workers. In the second chapter, I utilize this same source of variation to estimate the likelihood that an incumbent worker transitions to non-employment or across employment states. In the third chapter, I use residual wage estimates from panel data to examine the relationship between human capital, unobserved skills, and job displacement. Motivated by recent literature on systematic displacement, we apply an empirical approach that utilizes variation in the residual from a hedonic wage model to examine differences in the distribution of unobserved skill between displaced and continuously employed workers. Each of these three chapters makes a significant contribution to the existing empirical literature on Skill Biased Technical Change and job displacement in terms of both methodology and findings.

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