Labor and jobs

Prof. Daron Acemoglu and Prof. Simon Johnson write for Project Syndicate about how to structure U.S. international trade policies so that they benefit American workers and global stability. “Two new principles can form the basis of U.S. policy. First, international trade should be structured in a way to encourage a stable world order,” they write. “Second, appealing to abstract 'gains of trade' is no longer enough. American workers need to see the benefits. Any trade arrangement that significantly undermines the quality and quantity of middle-class American jobs is bad for the country and its people, and will likely incite a political backlash.”

A new study co-authored by Prof. Roberto Fernandez examines the obstacles facing women seeking to advance their careers in tech, reports Sarah Shemkus for The Boston Globe. The researchers found “recruiters were more likely to reach out to men and had longer conversations with male candidates,” writes Shemkus. “And women needed more impressive resumes to make the cut for recruiter outreach.”

A study co-authored by Prof. Anna Stansbury finds that “as the share of graduates in the UK workforce has expanded over the past 25 years, the wage premium they command relative to non-graduates has fallen,” reports John Burn-Murdoch for Financial Times. “We can thus infer that in the aggregate, Britain’s supply of skilled workers is outstripping demand in the form of skilled jobs,” writes Burn-Murdoch.

Researchers from MIT and elsewhere have found that “managers in a large retail chain saw women as having less leadership potential even though their performance reviews were better, on average, than those of their male peers,” reports Sarah Green Carmichael for The Washington Post. “Analyzing data on 30,000 employees, the researchers found that overperforming didn’t do much to improve women’s scores on leadership potential. Their bosses continued to underestimate them.”

A new study co-authored by Prof. Emilio Castilla finds that using stereotypically masculine or feminine adjectives to describe the qualities needed for a job opening has a negligible effect on who applies, reports Lisa Ward for The Wall Street Journal. “It’s a superficial intervention with little tangible effect,” says Castilla.

Writing for The Washington Post, Brian Deese, an MIT Innovation Fellow, explores the resilience of America’s post pandemic economic recovery and the strength of the labor market. “This economic recovery is defying expectations,” writes Deese. “Enabling more people to work can extend this improbable progress and lay the groundwork for long-term economic growth.”  

 Prof. Arnaud Costinot and Prof. Iván Werning speak with TechCrunch reporter Brian Heater about their research examining the potential impact of a robot tax on automation and jobs. “The potential wages people can earn may become more unequal with new technologies and the idea is that the tax can mitigate these effects,” Costinot and Werning explain. “In a sense, one can think of this as pre-distribution, affecting earnings before taxes, instead of redistribution.”

Prof. Simon Johnson speaks with Freakonomics guest host Adam Davidson about his new book, economic history, and why new technologies impact people differently. “What do people creating technology, deploying technology— what exactly are they seeking to achieve? If they’re seeking to replace people, then that’s what they’re going to be doing,” says Johnson. “But if they’re seeking to make people individually more productive, more creative, enable them to design and carry out new tasks — let’s push the vision more in that direction. And that’s a naturally more inclusive version of the market economy. And I think we will get better outcomes for more people.”

Forbes reporter Roger Trapp spotlights Prof. Zeynep Ton’s work in improving employer operations as part of an effort to better satisfy employees. Ton has written two books, “Good Jobs Strategy: How the Smartest Companies Invest in Employees to Lower Costs and Boost Profits” and “The Case for Good Jobs,” which explores how “a combination of high investment in people and a set of choices [can produce] operational excellence,” writes Trapp.

Prof. Nina Roussille has found that “women on average asked for 3.3% less than men for a full-time engineering job, with that gap growing to 6% for women with more experience,” reports Alicia Wallace for CNN. “However, when salary transparency was employed on the site and a median wage was given, the gap closed.” 

Prof. Emeritus Thomas Kochan speaks with Sarah Gonzalez of NPR’s Planet Money about why European workers tend to be allotted more vacation time than workers in the U.S. Kochan notes that “if given the option, workers are historically more interested in seeing their take-home pay increase than they are in getting another day or week of vacation,” particularly when they have to cover the costs of health insurance.

A working paper co-authored by Prof. John Horton and graduate students Emma van Inwegen and Zanele Munyikwa has found that “AI has the potential to level the playing field for non-native English speakers applying for jobs by helping them better present themselves to English-speaking employers,” reports Medora Lee for USA Today. “Between June 8 and July 14, 2021, [Inwegen] studied 480,948 job seekers, who applied for jobs that require English to be spoken but who mostly lived in nations where English is not the native language,” explains Lee. “Of those who used AI, 7.8% were more likely to be hired.”

Prof. David Autor and his colleagues have documented China’s impact on manufacturing jobs in the U.S. after joining the World Trade Organization in 2001, an effect known as the China shock, reports Shawn Donnan for Bloomberg in an article about how manufacturing job losses impacted Rockingham County in North Carolina. “Declining populations of young workers, as well as lower pay, have persisted in Rockingham and other communities hardest hit by this China shock, the researchers found in a 2021 paper,” writes Donnan.

Prof. David Autor speaks with Delphine Strauss of the Financial Times about the risks AI poses to jobs and job quality, but also the technology’s potential to help rebuild middle-class jobs. “The good case for AI is where it enables people with foundational expertise or judgment to do more expert work with less expertise,” says Autor. He adds, “My hope is that we can use AI to reinstate the value of skills held by people without as high a degree of formal education.”

Prof. Daron Acemoglu speaks with Boston Globe reporters Alex Kantrowitz and Douglas Gorman about how to address the advance of AI in the workplace. “We know from many areas that have rapidly automated that they don’t deliver the types of returns that they promised,” says Acemoglu. “Humans are underrated.”