The impact of automation and technological change on the labor market

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We plan to study the impact of automation and technological change on the labor market, and especially how this affects workers as they move through their careers.Our general strategy to assess these questions will be by developing and estimating structural models that describe the process by which workers progress through their careers, including decisions on when to work, which jobs to take, and critically, how to invest in human capital (or skills). We will classify occupations by the types of tasks that they require, and by doing so hope to understand which kinds of jobs are driving changes in the labor market and how this relates to technological change.One particular interest is inequality, and how this varies over workers' lifecycles and between different cohorts of workers. We hope to characterise the evolution of inequality over the past half century, and to what extent this has been driven by changes in the technologies with which output is produced.Some specific questions we are interested in answering are:* How does wage inequality vary over the lifecycle* How does the lifetime trajectory of wages and employment vary between cohorts* How do these trends compare between workers in different industries or occupations* To what extent are these trends driven by technological change* What strategies do workers use to adapt to or insure against technological change* How effective are these strategies, and is this changing over time