Description:

Rowena Gray (UC Merced): "Tasks and Black-white Inequality over the Long Twentieth Century"

Abstract: We present new evidence on the long-run trend of occupational task content by race in the United States, 1900-2021. Black workers began the transition to better paid, cognitiveintensive modern jobs at least a generation after white workers; substantial convergence only occurred from 1960 onwards. Longitudinal data suggests that transitions to new task content were racially biased: Black men moved to jobs with lower rewarded task content than white men, conditional on initial task content, though gaps decreased after World War II. Routine-intensive Black workers were less likely to move up into non-routine analytic work compared to white workers in both historical and modern periods. The results suggest that task-displacement shocks, such as automating routine-manual work, widen Black-white inequality.

Please note the change in usual room. This seminar will be in KGH 2410A&B.