The next Economics Seminar of Paris-Saclay will take place on Thursday, March 7th from 12h15 to 13h15, in room Gaudemet.
Sara Signorelli (Ecole Polytechnique/CREST) will present her paper “Digitalization, change in skill distance between occupations and worker mobility: a gravity model approach”, co-authored with A. Dupuy and M. Raux.
Abstract: The recent digital revolution has significantly broadened the scope of IT-related tasks across various occupations within the labor market. In this paper we document these changes, we propose a novel conceptual framework for thinking about the effect of technological change, and we investigate its impact on worker mobility across occupations using a gravity equation approach. Our results reveal that the evolution of skill distance between jobs significantly affected mobility patterns, disproportionately favoring workers with pre-existing knowledge of digital tools. Finally, we micro-found our gravity equation through a matching model to evaluate mobility in counterfactual scenarios without technological change.
Link to the seminar web page: https://sites.google.com/view/sem-econ-saclay/home