IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/glh/wpfacu/115.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Is Our Human Capital General Enough to Withstand the Current Wave of Technological Change?

Author

Listed:
  • Ljubica Nedelkoska

    (Center for International Development at Harvard University)

  • Dario Diodato
  • Frank Neffke

    (Center for International Development at Harvard University)

Abstract

The degree to which modern technologies are able to substitute for groups of job tasks has renewed fears of near-future technological unemployment. We argue that our knowledge, skills and abilities (KSA) go beyond the specific tasks we do at the job, making us potentially more adaptable to technological change than feared. The disruptiveness of new technologies depends on the relationships between the job tasks susceptible to automation and our KSA. Here we first demonstrate that KSA are general human capital features while job tasks are not, suggesting that human capital is more transferrable across occupations than what job tasks would predict. In spite of this, we document a worrying pattern where automation is not randomly distributed across the KSA space – it is concentrated among occupations that share similar KSA. As a result, workers in these occupations are making longer skill transitions when changing occupations and have higher probability of unemployment.

Suggested Citation

Handle: RePEc:glh:wpfacu:115
as

Download full text from publisher

File URL: https://growthlab.cid.harvard.edu/files/growthlab/files/humancapital_automation_cidrfwp93.pdf
Download Restriction: no
---><---

Corrections

All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:glh:wpfacu:115. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Chuck McKenney (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://growthlab.hks.harvard.edu/ .

Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.