Abstract:
We study how feasible skill relatedness across occupations – task overlap discounted by the educational distance a worker would have to climb – evolved in the United States between 1940 and 2019. For each declining occupation, we measure its opportunity space: the growing occupations its workers could move to without losing much of their skills, given how many workers these occupations could absorb. Using a sample of displaced workers, 1984–2024, we estimate the earnings cost of task distance and use it to assign a price to the reallocation of labor from declining to growing occupations, by occupation and decade. Task distance peaked in mid-century, when agriculture declined sharply and cognitive work expanded; the educational upgrading that moves required peaked around 2000. Farmers and, later, machine operators bore the highest costs: waves of occupational decline met a growing economy that was distant in tasks and, increasingly, in education. The aggregate cost of task distance has fallen since mid-century, as fewer workers had to change occupations and their moves became shorter.
About the speaker:
Ljubica Nedelkoska is a faculty member at the Complexity Science Hub and a visiting professor at the Central European University, where she co-directs the Growth CoLab. She studies the impact of technology on the labor market, skills, migration and diasporas, and is interested in development, public policy and labor economics.
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