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Abstract: What happens when disappearing jobs are intermediate steps toward high-skilled employment? We combine PSID employment histories with historical job ads data and develop a life-cycle model of occupational choice, human capital accumulation, and limited employment opportunities. Routine cognitive occupations emerge as the main stepping stones toward non-routine cognitive (NRC) work by preserving human capital relevant for NRC productivity and improving access to NRC offers later in life. The hollowing out of routine employment opportunities reduces later-career NRC employment by 4.5–5.9 percent in each year during the 2000s–2020s and lowers earnings among workers who still reach NRC.

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Abstract: What is the contribution of individual human capital responses to earnings inequality arising in the process of the routine-biased technological change (RBTC)? To answer this question, I develop a life-cycle 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. 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.

Work in progress 

Abstract: Long-term care needs are commonly measured by the number of daily activities with reported difficulty or hours of assistance received. However, these measures provide limited information about the cost of performing individual tasks without help and the potential gains from alternative care arrangements. We develop a task-based model of long-term care in which individuals combine their own time with formal and informal assistance to perform everyday activities. Building on the multidimensional skill mismatch approach, we model the productivity of self care as a function of the mismatch between the cognitive and physical requirements of each task and the individual's corresponding health capacities. The framework allows us to distinguish the ability to complete an activity from the welfare cost of performing it under substantial difficulty. Using data from SHARE, medical expert assessments of task requirements, and OECD care affordability reports, we aim to quantify welfare losses from unassisted limitations, compare long-term care arrangements across European countries, and evaluate task-specific policy interventions and assistive technologies that can reduce the costs of care.

Work in progress  NBER Poster

Horizon Europe Research Project: BB-Future

Abstract: What are the implications of a rise in the long-term care needs of parents at an older age for the lifetime location choices made by their children? Using the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe (SHARE), we highlight the ways in which children's location choices and parents' long-term care needs might interact. We document four key facts: (i) a steep increase in the average distance between children and parents up to age 30, followed by a flattening of the trend thereafter; (ii) substantial cross-country variation in the share of children living far from their parents, which correlates with the generosity of formal long-term care systems; (iii) evidence that most cases of co-residence are long-standing rather than initiated in response to parental health shocks; and (iv) a smaller share of co-residence episodes that arise in response to sudden care needs. Taken together, these findings provide the empirical foundation for the structural quantitative model of long-term care provision a la Barczyk & Kredler (2018, REStud) augmented by a location choice. The estimated model will allow us to assess the potential productivity losses associated with the distortion of children's location choice and to assess the implications of long-term-care and mobility-enhancing policies.

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Abstract: How do workers adapt to employment in different occupations, industries, and labor markets for different education groups? What common features do labor market disruptions have that make it hard for workers to adapt? What forges the adaptive capacity of workers? To shed light on these questions, we consider a state-of-the-art economic model of workers' decision making and use it to quantitatively evaluate the predictions of adaptation theory from modern biology and ecology — sciences that study the adaptation of the most diverse entities in the universe. The universality of the results delivered by many decades of adaptation research in biology and ecology allows us to analyze the adaptive responses of workers across different contexts within a single framework, to predict the consequences of major labor market disruptions, such as automation, the introduction of AI, and climate change, and, ultimately, to make a step towards the development of a general theory of worker adaptation.