David Autor
Biographic Data
| ID | 1089526 |
|---|---|
| NAME | David Autor |
| GIVEN NAMES | David |
| FAMILY NAME | Autor |
| SIGNATURE | AUTOR D |
| AFFILIATIONS | National Bureau of Economic Research |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-6915-9381 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 42 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 1139 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 42 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1988 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 11 |
Trading Places: Mobility Responses of Native- and Foreign-Born Adults to the China Trade Shock
Previous research finds that the greater geographic mobility of foreign-born workers compared to native-born workers facilitates labor market adjustment to shifting regional economic conditions. The authors examine immigration’s role in enabling US commuting zones to respond to manufacturing job loss caused by import competition from China. Although foreign-born population headcounts fell by a larger proportion than those of the native-born in tr…
Help for the Heartland? The Employment and Electoral Effects of the Trump Tariffs in the United States
We study the economic and political consequences of the 2018-2019 trade war between the United States, China and other US trade partners at the detailed geographic level, exploiting measures of local exposure to US import tariffs, foreign retaliatory tariffs, and US compensation programs.The trade-war has not to date provided economic help to the US heartland: import tariffs on foreign goods neither raised nor lowered US employment in newly-prote…
Males at the Tails: How Socioeconomic Status Shapes the Gender Gap
We document that the female advantage in childhood behavioural and academic outcomes is driven by gender gaps at the extremes of the outcome distribution. Using unconditional quantile regression, we show that family socioeconomic status particularly influences boys’ relative to girls’ outcomes at the lower tails of the outcome distribution, precisely where gender gaps are most pronounced. These relationships are not explained by school or neighbo…
Artificial Intelligence and Jobs: Evidence from Online Vacancies
We study the impact of artificial intelligence (AI) on labor markets using establishment-level data on the near universe of online vacancies in the United States from 2010 onward. There is rapid growth in AI-related vacancies over 2010–18 that is driven by establishments whose workers engage in tasks compatible with AI’s current capabilities. As these AI-exposed establishments adopt AI, they simultaneously reduce hiring in non-AI positions and ch…
The Work of the Future: Building Better Jobs in an Age of Intelligent Machines
Why the United States lags behind other industrialized countries in sharing the benefits of innovation with workers and how we can remedy the problem. The United States has too many low-quality, low-wage jobs. Every country has its share, but those in the United States are especially poorly paid and often without benefits. Meanwhile, overall productivity increases steadily and new technology has transformed large parts of the economy, enhancing t…
The Fall of the Labor Share and the Rise of Superstar Firms
The fall of labor’s share of GDP in the United States and many other countries in recent decades is well documented but its causes remain uncertain. Existing empirical assessments typically rely on industry or macro data, obscuring heterogeneity among firms. In this article, we analyze micro panel data from the U.S. Economic Census since 1982 and document empirical patterns to assess a new interpretation of the fall in the labor share based on th…
Importing Political Polarization? The Electoral Consequences of Rising Trade Exposure
Has rising import competition contributed to the polarization of US politics? Analyzing multiple measures of political expression and results of congressional and presidential elections spanning the period 2000 through 2016, we find strong though not definitive evidence of an ideological realignment in trade-exposed local labor markets that commences prior to the divisive 2016 US presidential election. Exploiting the exogenous component of rising…
Toward understanding the impact of artificial intelligence on labor
Rapid advances in artificial intelligence (AI) and automation technologies have the potential to significantly disrupt labor markets. While AI and automation can augment the productivity of some workers, they can replace the work done by others and will likely transform almost all occupations at least to some degree. Rising automation is happening in a period of growing economic inequality, raising fears of mass technological unemployment and a r…
Family Disadvantage and the Gender Gap in Behavioral and Educational Outcomes
Boys born to disadvantaged families have higher rates of disciplinary problems, lower achievement scores, and fewer high school completions than girls from comparable backgrounds. Using birth certificates matched to schooling records for Florida children born 1992–2002, we find that family disadvantage disproportionately impedes the pre-market development of boys. The differential effect of family disadvantage on boys is robust to specifications …
Work of the Past, Work of the Future
US cities today are vastly more educated and skill-intensive than they were five decades ago. Yet, urban non-college workers perform substantially less skilled jobs than decades earlier. This deskilling reflects the joint effects of automation and, secondarily, rising international trade, which have eliminated the bulk of non-college production, administrative support, and clerical jobs, yielding a disproportionate polarization of urban labor mar…
Concentrating on the Fall of the Labor Share
The recent fall of labor's share of GDP in numerous countries is well-documented, but its causes are poorly understood. We sketch a “superstar firm” model where industries are increasingly characterized by “winner take most” competition, leading a small number of highly profitable (and low labor share) firms to command growing market share. Building on Autor et al. (2017), we evaluate and confirm two core claims of the superstar firm hypothesis: …
Importing Political Polarization? The Electoral Consequences of Rising Trade Exposure
Has rising import competition contributed to the polarization of U.S. politics? Analyzing outcomes from the 2002 and 2010 congressional elections and the 2000, 2008, and 2016 presidential elections, we detect an ideological realignment that is centered in trade-exposed local labor markets and that commences prior to the divisive 2016 U.S. presidential election. Exploiting the exogenous component of rising trade with China and classifying legislat…
The Contribution of the Minimum Wage to US Wage Inequality over Three Decades: A Reassessment
We reassess the effect of minimum wages on US earnings inequality using additional decades of data and an IV strategy that addresses potential biases in prior work. We find that the minimum wage reduces inequality in the lower tail of the wage distribution, though by substantially less than previous estimates, suggesting that rising lower tail inequality after 1980 primarily reflects underlying wage structure changes rather than an unmasking of l…
Import Competition and the Great US Employment Sag of the 2000s
Even before the Great Recession, US employment growth was unimpressive. Between 2000 and 2007, the economy gave back the considerable employment gains achieved during the 1990s, with a historic contraction in manufacturing employment being a prime contributor to the slump. We estimate that import competition from China, which surged after 2000, was a major force behind both recent reductions in US manufacturing employment and—through input-output…
The China Shock: Learning from Labor-Market Adjustment to Large Changes in Trade
China's emergence as a great economic power has induced an epochal shift in patterns of world trade. Simultaneously, it has challenged much of the received empirical wisdom about how labor markets adjust to trade shocks. Alongside the heralded consumer benefits of expanded trade are substantial adjustment costs and distributional consequences. These impacts are most visible in the local labor markets in which the industries exposed to foreign com…
Untangling Trade and Technology: Evidence from Local Labour Markets
We juxtapose the effects of trade and technology on employment in US local labour markets between 1980 and 2007. Labour markets whose initial industry composition exposes them to rising Chinese import competition experience significant falls in employment, particularly in manufacturing and among non-college workers. Labour markets susceptible to computerisation due to specialisation in routine task-intensive activities instead experience occupati…
Why Are There Still So Many Jobs? The History and Future of Workplace Automation
In this essay, I begin by identifying the reasons that automation has not wiped out a majority of jobs over the decades and centuries. Automation does indeed substitute for labor-as it is typically intended to do. However, automation also complements labor, raises output in ways that leads to higher demand for labor, and interacts with adjustments in labor supply. Journalists and even expert commentators tend to overstate the extent of machine su…
Trade Adjustment: Worker-Level Evidence
We analyze the effect of exposure to international trade on earnings and employment of U.S. workers from 1992 through 2007 by exploiting industry shocks to import competition stemming from China’s spectacular rise as a manufacturing exporter paired with longitudinal data on individual earnings by employer spanning close to two decades. Individuals who in 1991 worked in manufacturing industries that experienced high subsequent import growth garner…
Housing Market Spillovers: Evidence from the End of Rent Control in Cambridge, Massachusetts
We measure the capitalization of housing market externalities into residential housing values by studying the unanticipated elimination of stringent rent controls in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1995. Pooling data on the universe of assessed values and transacted prices of Cambridge residential properties between 1988 and 2005, we find that rent decontrol generated substantial, robust price appreciation at decontrolled units and nearby never-cont…
The “task approach” to labor markets: An overview
Putting Tasks to the Test: Human Capital, Job Tasks, and Wages
Using original, representative survey data, we document that analytical, routine, and manual job tasks can be measured with high validity, vary substantially within and between occupations, are significantly related to workers’ characteristics, and are robustly predictive of wage differences between occupations and among workers in the same occupation. We offer a conceptual framework that makes explicit the causal links between human capital endo…
The China Syndrome: Local Labor Market Effects of Import Competition in the United States
We analyze the effect of rising Chinese import competition between 1990 and 2007 on US local labor markets, exploiting cross-market variation in import exposure stemming from initial differences in industry specialization and instrumenting for US imports using changes in Chinese imports by other high-income countries. Rising imports cause higher unemployment, lower labor force participation, and reduced wages in local labor markets that house imp…
The Growth of Low-Skill Service Jobs and the Polarization of the US Labor Market
We offer a unified analysis of the growth of low-skill service occupations between 1980 and 2005 and the concurrent polarization of US employment and wages. We hypothesize that polarization stems from 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 corroborate four implications of this hypothesis. Local…
What Does Human Capital Do? A Review of Goldin and Katz's The Race between Education and Technology
Goldin and Katz's The Race between Education and Technology is a monumental achievement that supplies a unified framework for interpreting how the demand and supply of human capital have shaped the distribution of earnings in the U.S. labor market over the twentieth century. This essay reviews the theoretical and conceptual underpinnings of this work and documents the success of Goldin and Katz's framework in accounting for numerous broad labor m…
The Journal of Economic Perspectives at 100 (Issues)
When I was a graduate student, I discovered that the Journal of Economic Perspectives embodied much of what I love about the field of economics: the clarity that pierces rhetoric to seek the core of a question; the rigor to identify the causal relationships, tradeoffs, and indeterminancies inherent in a problem; the self-assurance to apply the disciplinary toolkit to problems both sacred and profane; and the force of logic to reach conclusions th…
The Growth of Low-Skill Service Jobs and the Polarization of the US Labor Market
We offer a unified analysis of the growth of low-skill service occupations between 1980 and 2005 and the concurrent polarization of US employment and wages. We hypothesize that polarization stems from 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 corroborate four implications of this hypothesis. Local…
Why Are There Still So Many Jobs? The History and Future of Workplace Automation
In this essay, I begin by identifying the reasons that automation has not wiped out a majority of jobs over the decades and centuries. Automation does indeed substitute for labor-as it is typically intended to do. However, automation also complements labor, raises output in ways that leads to higher demand for labor, and interacts with adjustments in labor supply. Journalists and even expert commentators tend to overstate the extent of machine su…
Skills, Tasks and Technologies: Implications for Employment and Earnings
A central organizing framework of the voluminous recent literature studying changes in the returns to skills and the evolution of earnings inequality is what we refer to as the canonical model, which elegantly and powerfully operationalizes the supply and demand for skills by assuming two distinct skill groups that perform two different and imperfectly substitutable tasks or produce two imperfectly substitutable goods. Technology is assumed to ta…
The China Shock: Learning from Labor-Market Adjustment to Large Changes in Trade
China's emergence as a great economic power has induced an epochal shift in patterns of world trade. Simultaneously, it has challenged much of the received empirical wisdom about how labor markets adjust to trade shocks. Alongside the heralded consumer benefits of expanded trade are substantial adjustment costs and distributional consequences. These impacts are most visible in the local labor markets in which the industries exposed to foreign com…
Untangling Trade and Technology: Evidence from Local Labour Markets
We juxtapose the effects of trade and technology on employment in US local labour markets between 1980 and 2007. Labour markets whose initial industry composition exposes them to rising Chinese import competition experience significant falls in employment, particularly in manufacturing and among non-college workers. Labour markets susceptible to computerisation due to specialisation in routine task-intensive activities instead experience occupati…
Women, War, and Wages: The Effect of Female Labor Supply on the Wage Structure at Midcentury
We exploit the military mobilization for World War II to investigate the effects of female labor supply on the wage structure. The mobilization drew many women into the workforce permanently. But the impact was not uniform across states. In states with greater mobilization of men, women worked more after the war and in 1950, though not in 1940. These induced shifts in female labor supply lowered female and male wages and increased earnings inequa…
Does Employment Protection Reduce Productivity? Evidence from US States
Theory predicts that mandated employment protection may reduce productivity by distorting production choices. We use the adoption of wrongful-discharge protection by state courts in the US from 1970 to 1999 to evaluate the empirical link between dismissal costs and productivity. Drawing on establishment-level data from the Census Bureau, our estimates suggest that wrongful-discharge protection reduces employment flows and firm entry rates. Moreov…
Upstairs, Downstairs: Computers and Skills on Two Floors of a Large Bank
Many studies document a positive correlation between workplace computerization and employment of skilled labor in production. Why does this correlation arise? The authors posit that improvements in computer-based technology create incentives to substitute machinery for people in performing tasks that can be fully described by procedural or "rules-based" logic and hence performed by a computer. This process typically leaves many tasks unaltered, a…
Housing Market Spillovers: Evidence from the End of Rent Control in Cambridge, Massachusetts
We measure the capitalization of housing market externalities into residential housing values by studying the unanticipated elimination of stringent rent controls in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1995. Pooling data on the universe of assessed values and transacted prices of Cambridge residential properties between 1988 and 2005, we find that rent decontrol generated substantial, robust price appreciation at decontrolled units and nearby never-cont…
Wiring the Labor Market
Workers and jobs are naturally heterogeneous and the quality of their interaction when paired is difficult to forecast. The Internet promises to open new channels for worker-firm communications. What are the consequences of this opening? I discuss three labor market features that may be altered: how worker-firm matches are made; how labor services are delivered; and how local markets shape labor demand. Theory predicts these developments will pro…
The Growth in the Social Security Disability Rolls: A Fiscal Crisis Unfolding
The U.S. Social Security Disability Insurance (DI) program has grown dramatically over the last 20 years in size and expense. This growth poses significant risks to the finances of the DI program and the broader Social Security system, and raises troubling questions as to whether the program is being misused by claimants. This article first provides an overview of the Disability Insurance program, describing who qualifies for the program, how an …
Males at the Tails: How Socioeconomic Status Shapes the Gender Gap
We document that the female advantage in childhood behavioural and academic outcomes is driven by gender gaps at the extremes of the outcome distribution. Using unconditional quantile regression, we show that family socioeconomic status particularly influences boys’ relative to girls’ outcomes at the lower tails of the outcome distribution, precisely where gender gaps are most pronounced. These relationships are not explained by school or neighbo…
The Journal of Economic Perspectives at 100 (Issues)
When I was a graduate student, I discovered that the Journal of Economic Perspectives embodied much of what I love about the field of economics: the clarity that pierces rhetoric to seek the core of a question; the rigor to identify the causal relationships, tradeoffs, and indeterminancies inherent in a problem; the self-assurance to apply the disciplinary toolkit to problems both sacred and profane; and the force of logic to reach conclusions th…
Negative Androgyny and Self-Esteem: Towards a Confound-Free Scale
To assess the effects of negatively valued items on the concept of androgyny and its relationship with self-esteem, negative items were constructed to parallel the positively valued masculine and feminine items in the Bern Sex-role Inventory and validated for equivalent gender association. These items were added to the original positive items and the revised scale was administered with a self-derogation scale to 27 male and 26 female college stud…
Computing Inequality: Have Computers Changed the Labor Market?
This paper examines the effect of skill-biased technological change as measured by computerization on the recent widening of U. S. educational wage differentials. An analysis of aggregate changes in the relative supplies and wages of workers by education from 1940 to 1996 indicates strong and persistent growth in relative demand favoring college graduates. Rapid skill upgrading within detailed industries accounts for most of the growth in the rel…
Changes in the Wage Structure and Earnings Inequality
Wiring the Labor Market
Workers and jobs are naturally heterogeneous and the quality of their interaction when paired is difficult to forecast. The Internet promises to open new channels for worker-firm communications. What are the consequences of this opening? I discuss three labor market features that may be altered: how worker-firm matches are made; how labor services are delivered; and how local markets shape labor demand. Theory predicts these developments will pro…
Upstairs, Downstairs: Computers and Skills on Two Floors of a Large Bank
Many studies document a positive correlation between workplace computerization and employment of skilled labor in production. Why does this correlation arise? The authors posit that improvements in computer-based technology create incentives to substitute machinery for people in performing tasks that can be fully described by procedural or "rules-based" logic and hence performed by a computer. This process typically leaves many tasks unaltered, a…
The Rise in the Disability Rolls and the Decline in Unemployment
Between 1984 and 2001, the share of nonelderly adults receiving Social Security Disability Insurance income (DI) rose by 60 percent to 5.3 million beneficiaries. Rapid program growth despite improving aggregate health appears to be explained by reduced screening stringency, declining demand for less skilled workers, and an unforeseen increase in the earnings replacement rate. We estimate that the sum of these forces doubled the labor force exit p…
Outsourcing at Will: The Contribution of Unjust Dismissal Doctrine to the Growth of Employment Outsourcing
Over the past 3 decades, the U.S. Temporary Help Services (THS) industry grew five times more rapidly than overall employment. Contemporaneously, courts in 46 states adopted exceptions to the common law doctrine of employment at will that limited employers’ discretion to terminate workers and opened them to litigation. This article assesses the contribution of “unjust dismissal” doctrine to THS employment specifically, and outsourcing more genera…
The Skill Content of Recent Technological Change: An Empirical Exploration
We apply an understanding of what computers do to study how computerization alters job skill demands. We argue that computer capital (1) substitutes for workers in performing cognitive and manual tasks that can be accomplished by following explicit rules; and (2) complements workers in performing nonroutine problem-solving and complex communications tasks. Provided that these tasks are imperfect substitutes, our model implies measurable changes i…
Women, War, and Wages: The Effect of Female Labor Supply on the Wage Structure at Midcentury
We exploit the military mobilization for World War II to investigate the effects of female labor supply on the wage structure. The mobilization drew many women into the workforce permanently. But the impact was not uniform across states. In states with greater mobilization of men, women worked more after the war and in 1950, though not in 1940. These induced shifts in female labor supply lowered female and male wages and increased earnings inequa…
The Decline in Employment of People with Disabilities: A Policy Puzzle
The Polarization of the U.S. Labor Market
This paper analyzes a marked change in the evolution of the U.S. wage structure over the past fifteen years: divergent trends in upper-tail (90/50) and lower-tail (50/10) wage inequality. We document that wage inequality in the top half of distribution has displayed an unchecked and rather smooth secular rise for the last 25 years (since 1980). Wage inequality in the bottom half of the distribution also grew rapidly from 1979 to 1987, but it has …
The Costs of Wrongful-Discharge Laws
We estimate the effects on employment and wages of wrongful-discharge protections adopted by U.S. state courts during the last three decades. We find robust evidence that one wrongful-discharge doctrine, the implied-contract exception, reduced state employment rates by 0.8% to 1.7%. The initial impact is largest for female and less-educated workers (those who change jobs frequently), while the longer-term effect is greater for older and more-educ…
The Growth in the Social Security Disability Rolls: A Fiscal Crisis Unfolding
The U.S. Social Security Disability Insurance (DI) program has grown dramatically over the last 20 years in size and expense. This growth poses significant risks to the finances of the DI program and the broader Social Security system, and raises troubling questions as to whether the program is being misused by claimants. This article first provides an overview of the Disability Insurance program, describing who qualifies for the program, how an …
Does Employment Protection Reduce Productivity? Evidence from US States
Theory predicts that mandated employment protection may reduce productivity by distorting production choices. We use the adoption of wrongful-discharge protection by state courts in the US from 1970 to 1999 to evaluate the empirical link between dismissal costs and productivity. Drawing on establishment-level data from the Census Bureau, our estimates suggest that wrongful-discharge protection reduces employment flows and firm entry rates. Moreov…
Trends in U.S. Wage Inequality: Revising the Revisionists
A recent “revisionist” literature characterizes the pronounced rise in U.S. wage inequality since 1980 as an “episodic” event of the first half of the 1980s driven by nonmarket factors (particularly a falling real minimum wage) and concludes that continued increases in wage inequality since the late 1980s substantially reflect the mechanical confounding effects of changes in labor force composition. Analyzing data from the Current Population Surv…
Skills, Tasks and Technologies: Implications for Employment and Earnings
A central organizing framework of the voluminous recent literature studying changes in the returns to skills and the evolution of earnings inequality is what we refer to as the canonical model, which elegantly and powerfully operationalizes the supply and demand for skills by assuming two distinct skill groups that perform two different and imperfectly substitutable tasks or produce two imperfectly substitutable goods. Technology is assumed to ta…
Skills, Tasks and Technologies: Implications for Employment and Earnings
What Does Human Capital Do? A Review of Goldin and Katz's The Race between Education and Technology
Goldin and Katz's The Race between Education and Technology is a monumental achievement that supplies a unified framework for interpreting how the demand and supply of human capital have shaped the distribution of earnings in the U.S. labor market over the twentieth century. This essay reviews the theoretical and conceptual underpinnings of this work and documents the success of Goldin and Katz's framework in accounting for numerous broad labor m…
The Journal of Economic Perspectives at 100 (Issues)
When I was a graduate student, I discovered that the Journal of Economic Perspectives embodied much of what I love about the field of economics: the clarity that pierces rhetoric to seek the core of a question; the rigor to identify the causal relationships, tradeoffs, and indeterminancies inherent in a problem; the self-assurance to apply the disciplinary toolkit to problems both sacred and profane; and the force of logic to reach conclusions th…
The “task approach” to labor markets: An overview
Putting Tasks to the Test: Human Capital, Job Tasks, and Wages
Using original, representative survey data, we document that analytical, routine, and manual job tasks can be measured with high validity, vary substantially within and between occupations, are significantly related to workers’ characteristics, and are robustly predictive of wage differences between occupations and among workers in the same occupation. We offer a conceptual framework that makes explicit the causal links between human capital endo…
The China Syndrome: Local Labor Market Effects of Import Competition in the United States
We analyze the effect of rising Chinese import competition between 1990 and 2007 on US local labor markets, exploiting cross-market variation in import exposure stemming from initial differences in industry specialization and instrumenting for US imports using changes in Chinese imports by other high-income countries. Rising imports cause higher unemployment, lower labor force participation, and reduced wages in local labor markets that house imp…
The Growth of Low-Skill Service Jobs and the Polarization of the US Labor Market
We offer a unified analysis of the growth of low-skill service occupations between 1980 and 2005 and the concurrent polarization of US employment and wages. We hypothesize that polarization stems from 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 corroborate four implications of this hypothesis. Local…
Trade Adjustment: Worker-Level Evidence
We analyze the effect of exposure to international trade on earnings and employment of U.S. workers from 1992 through 2007 by exploiting industry shocks to import competition stemming from China’s spectacular rise as a manufacturing exporter paired with longitudinal data on individual earnings by employer spanning close to two decades. Individuals who in 1991 worked in manufacturing industries that experienced high subsequent import growth garner…
Housing Market Spillovers: Evidence from the End of Rent Control in Cambridge, Massachusetts
We measure the capitalization of housing market externalities into residential housing values by studying the unanticipated elimination of stringent rent controls in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1995. Pooling data on the universe of assessed values and transacted prices of Cambridge residential properties between 1988 and 2005, we find that rent decontrol generated substantial, robust price appreciation at decontrolled units and nearby never-cont…
Economics (39 works) · Labour economics (25 works) · Labor market dynamics and wage inequality (23 works) · Business (17 works) · Political science (15 works) · Wage (15 works) · Demographic economics (12 works) · Economic Growth and Productivity (9 works) · Employment and Welfare Studies (9 works) · Computer Science (8 works)