The Great Reversal in the Demand for Skill and Cognitive Tasks By Paul Beaudry, David A. Green and Benjamin M. Sand
How can we explain the low rate of employment in the U.S.? This
paper documents a decline in demand for job skills since
2000 even as the supply of highly educated workers continues to
grow. The authors go on to show that in response to this demand
reversal, high-skilled workers have moved down the occupational
ladder and have begun to perform jobs traditionally performed by
lower-skilled workers. This de-skilling process in turn results
in high-skilled workers pushing low-skilled workers even further
down the occupational ladder and, to some degree, out of the
labor force all together.
David A. Green will be presenting on this research at the Center
for Poverty Research October conference “Employment, Earnings and
Inequality: Realities and Opportunities in Low Wage Labor
Markets.” Green is a professor in the Vancouver School of
Economics at the University of British Columbia and an
International Fellow at the Institute for Fiscal Studies in
London.
