Crowding the Pond? Technological Change Under Search Frictions
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Date
2024
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Abstract
In this thesis, I investigate the recent evolution of employment under a framework of noncompetitive labor markets. First, I show that “routine biased technological change” has seemingly not had any impact on the task content of jobs for higher skilled workers in the US. It also had different effects among high- school graduates and dropouts, with the first being displaced out of manual and cognitive routine occupations, and the latter being displaced only from manual routine occupations. A labor market semi-directed search model can explain the differing trends of employment for differently skilled workers. The differences are explained mainly by an extra-skill congestion effect, which amplifies the effect of changes in demand on the job finding probabilities for lower skilled workers. This framework also allows me to study the hypothesis of crowding out of low- skill workers by high-skill workers in the labor market. I find some evidence of this mechanism, although its effect appears to be small and less important than the effects of changes in labor demand.
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Tesis (Master of Economics)--Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, 2024