Search Results
Working Paper
Job Transformation, Specialization, and the Labor Market Effects of AI
Who will gain and who will lose as AI automates tasks? While much of the discourse focuses on job displacement, we show that job transformation—a shift in the task content of jobs—creates large and heterogeneous earnings effects. We develop a quantitative, task-based model where occupations bundle multiple tasks and workers possessing heterogeneous portfolios of task-specific skills select into occupations by comparative advantage. Automation shifts the relative importance of tasks within each occupation, inducing wage effects that we characterize analytically. To quantify these effects, ...