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Work
in Progress
Taking Technology to Task:
The Skill Content of Technological Change in Early Twentieth Century
United States ( Job Market Paper) PDF Draft
This paper presents a new picture of the labor market effects of technological change in pre-WWII United States. I show that, similar to the recent era of computerization, the electrification of the manufacturing sector led to a "hollowing out" of the skill distribution whereby workers in the middle of the distribution lost out to those at the extremes. To answer this question, a new dataset detailing the task composition of occupations in the United States for the period 1880-1940 was constructed using information about the task content of over 4,000 occupations from the Dictionary of Occupational Titles (1949). This unique data was used to measure the skill bias of electrification within the U.S. manufacturing sector. OLS and 2SLS estimates show that electrification increased the demand for clerical, numerical, planning and people skills relative to manual skills while simultaneously reducing relative demand for dexterity-intensive jobs which comprised the middle of the skill distribution. Thus, early twentieth century technological change was unskill-biased for blue collar tasks but skill-biased on aggregate. These results are in line with existing evidence of a downward trend in wage differentials within U.S. manufacturing in the period up to 1950 while providing new evidence on the labor market impact of general purpose technologies.
Task Specialization among
Immigrants and Natives: United States, 1860-1930
The existing historical literature suggests that immigration had a large negative effect on the wages of native-born U.S. workers. However, these studies assume a homogeneous labor force and a consequently uniform effect of immigration on native workers and they use highly aggregated information on wages that may not be representative of all regions and occupations. This paper investigates the possibility that natives were able to respond to immigration and thus avoid, to some extent, the postulated negative wage effects. Specifically, I explore whether natives in the period 1860-1930 responded to increased immigration by switching into occupations requiring skills in which they enjoyed a comparative advantage relative to immigrants, namely jobs involving communication and language skills as well as local knowledge. Following Peri and Sparber (2009), a model of task specialization in the presence of two types of workers, natives and immigrants, is first presented and is then estimated using a dataset which combines census data with information about tasks performed in jobs from the Dictionary of Occupational Titles (1949). The findings from weighted least squares regressions show that a one percentage point increase in the share of the foreign born in the labor force yields up to a 0.49% increase in the relative supply of communication tasks among natives. These findings suggest that, because existing studies have not accounted for native specialization, the estimated negative wage effects are biased upwards.
Geography Is Not Destiny:
Geography, Institutions and Literacy in Pre-Industrial England (with
Gregory Clark)
Geography created substantial differences in inequality in the English countryside in the pre-industrial era. The grain cultivating south-east had a small elite of large farmers along with a mass of landless laborers. The pastoral north and west had a mass of small independent farmers, and modest numbers of hired workers. Sokoloff and Engerman (2000), argue that similar differences in social structure between the plantation agricultures of the south of the Americas, and the family farms of the north, explain the large scale investment in human capital in the north, and its absence in the south. The elites in the south of the Americas allegedly had little incentive to foster public education, and the workers had little ability to acquire it on their own. What then was the effect of geography on educational attainment in pre-industrial England? We show here that while there were dramatic differences in levels of rural literacy across England in 1810 and later, they were independent of geographically created inequality in the countryside. Culture was the force that drove literacy, not geography. Geography is not destiny.
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Associate Instructor, Economics, UC Davis
“American Economic History before the Civil War”
Summer 2008
Lecturer, Economics, California State University, East
Bay
“Principles of Macroeconomics”
Teaching Assistant
Introduction to Microeconomics (Fall 2005)
Introduction to Macroeconomics (Winter and Spring 2006)
World Economic History (Fall 2006 and Spring 2007)
American Economic History (Winter 2007 and Spring 2008)
Economic Development (Winter 2008 and Spring 2009)
Economics of the Labor Market (Winter 2009)
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About Me
My research
interests are in historical applications of topics in the fields of
labor and growth economics. History can provide a unique testing ground
for economic theory and also for understanding the present by looking
at the very long run. I am currently working on two papers that
identify the effects of immigration and electrification, respectively,
on the labor market outcomes of different groups of workers in the
period 1870-1940. For more information, please see the Research
section.
Other works in progress include a look at regional differences in inequality
in early-modern England and how that related to factor endowments (with
Gregory Clark), and an analysis of the effect of immigration on crime
in late-nineteenth century United States.
When not working on my dissertation, I like to find authentic Irish
pubs in the Bay Area and try their bangers and mash, and hopefully
catch up on what’s happening in the English Premier League or the
Champions’ League in the process (that’s soccer in case you’re
stumped). I also enjoy travel, which is why I enjoyed this series: www.longwaydown.com.
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