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Disappearing stepping stones: technological change and career paths
Kashkarov, Daniil ; Artemev, V.
Which career paths lead workers towards high-skilled non-routine cognitive occupations? Using PSID data, we show that, for a significant share of workers, a career path towards non-routine cognitive occupations goes through middle-skilled routine occupations, with the majority going through a subset of routine cognitive occupations. We then argue that the decline in employment in routine cognitive occupations due to routine-biased technological change can negatively affect the chances of younger cohorts joining high-skilled occupations. To test this hypothesis, we develop a structural occupational choice model that endogenously generates realistic career paths and estimate it using PSID data and job ad data from three major US outlets covering the period from 1940 to 2000. Our estimations suggest that, on average, 6% of workers ending up in non-routine cognitive occupations use routine cognitive occupations as stepping stones that allow them to maintain and accumulate human capital and experience relevant for later employment in high-skilled occupations. A fall in employment opportunities in routine cognitive occupations over the period of the most intensive routine-biased technological change led to at least 1.37 million lost high-skilled workers who got stuck in less skilled occupations.
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RBTC and human capital: accounting for individual-level responses
Kashkarov, Daniil
I test the contribution of individual human capital responses to earnings inequality arising in the process of the routine-biased technological change (RBTC). I develop a lifecycle model of human capital and occupational choice, calibrate it to the NLSY79 data, using the price series for human capital in abstract and routine occupations estimated from the cross-sectional CPS data with the “flat spot” approach. I then use the model to quantify the effect of a change in human capital prices on earnings inequality. I find that an increase in the price for human capital in abstract occupations and a fall in its price in routine occupations associated with RBTC has a modest contribution to the evolution of variance of log-earnings — up to 10.8 per cent by the end of the working life cycle. However, the contribution of RBTC to an increase in the abstract wage premium over the lifetime of the NLSY79 cohorts is up to 28.6 per cent. The growth of the abstract wage premium is significantly dampened by the human capital responses of workers switching from routine occupations.
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Observing the Unobservable: Education and Signaling in Middle-Income Countries
Kashkarov, Daniil ; Špecián, Petr (advisor) ; Chytilová, Helena (referee)
The thesis examines the role of education signaling in dealing with information asymmetry on labor markets of lower-middle-income countries. The original hypothesis states that signaling component of education has significant effect on hiring decisions and wages in this group of states. To test the hypothesis, the model of employer learning is launched on individual cross-section data for four lower-middle-income countries: Armenia, Bolivia, Ghana and Vietnam. The natural logarithms of hourly wages are regressed on years of education, experience, measures of employees' aptitude, education-experience and aptitude-experience interaction terms. Maximum of parents' education, self-reported cognitive skills score and job-related skills score are used as proxies for workers' ability. No reliable evidence of education signaling being applied on labor markets of the studied countries was found, although information asymmetry is present.
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