Panoptiwork Talks/10: Tasks, Wages and New Technologies

On June 13^th , Dr. Femke Cnossen will give the last talk part of the panoptiwork talk series. It is called “Tasks, Wages and New Technologies“. Femke is Assistant Professor at the Faculty of Spatial Sciences of the RUG as well as a member of Panoptiwork. The talk and subsequent discussion will take place from 17h to 18h30, in the Diephuiszaal of the Röling Building.

REGISTRATION (hybrid): please email m.rudolf-cibien rug.nl.

Hereunder you can read the abstract of Femke’s presentation

Technological change has decreased the demand for routine tasks and increased demand for abstract and interactive ones. This paper studies the task returns to routine, abstract and social tasks using unique worker-level task data from a large, nationally-representative survey that allows for substantial within-occupation and between-industry variation in tasks. Consistent with the literature, routine tasks show negative wage returns and there is a wage premium associated with performing nonroutine tasks, both abstract and interactive. However, these wage returns vary in the interaction with different types of (new) technology, being ICT, internet, big data analysis, robots and artificial intelligence. Even though wages are on average higher in technology-intensive industries, the additional wage premium for abstract workers exposed to technology dwindles in the presence of more advanced software such as big data analysis and artificial intelligence.