📢 NEW WP. “The Value of Early-Career Skills” (w/ @SimonWiederhold). How can we measure the skills of early-career workers? How are these skills valued over workers’ careers? Did the returns to skills change over time? We study these questions in a new WP

RT @I_Am_NickBloom: *Call for papers for the 2025 Remote Work Conference*. Stanford, October 22 to 24 2025. In person presentations, and st….

I was fortunate to read this excellent book while auditing John's class at UChicago. It will be incredibly useful for both new generation and established economists looking to conduct experiments - Highly recommend!.

Spending the rest of the month at @UChicago visiting @Econ_4_Everyone. Let me know if you’re in town and want to grab a coffee! 😊🥶

RT @chr_langer: @sebbie88 and my #ASSA2025 session on “Technological Change and the Value of Skills“ happening now in room Yosemite A - Hil….

RT @Woessmann: 📢Call for papers:. 🚀3rd CESifo/ifo Junior Workshop on the Economics of Education🥳. 12-13 May 2025, Munich. Keynote: @ALPWill….

RT @LISER_LM: 📣 Welcome to Dr. Christina Langer of @DigEconLab.visiting for the next #DataScience & Simulation (DSS) Seminar. 🗣️ On Dec. 1….

@erikbryn @davidautor @ProfDavidDeming @LjubicaNed @Glenda_Quintini @carlbfrey @FuestClemens @Woessmann @APeichl @henninghermes @D_Langenmayr @JRuhose @PatrickNuess @lergetporer.

@ifo_Institut @ifo_Education @CESifoNetwork @DigEconLab @SIEPR @HarvardGrwthLab @tudresden_de @IWH_Halle @iza_bonn @ROAMaastricht @OECD_Social @OECD_Stat @VfS_econ.

[9] Heterogeneity II: Longer training activities are more effective at reducing automation risk, pointing to skill acquisition over signaling effects. Employer-funded training is most effective. 👉 Productivity gains materialize when employers are interested in training success.

[8] Heterogeneity I: Training is effective across nearly all countries, indicating strong external validity. Women tend to benefit more than men, with the gender advantage growing at older ages. This suggests training may reduce gender disparities in fast-evolving labor markets.

[7] Mechanisms II: Job training increases workers' (tested) digital skills, suggesting that it often involves learning to work with new technology. By shifting tasks and enhancing digital skills, training seems to equip workers with skills that complement automation technologies.

[6] Mechanisms I: Training allows workers to shift toward low-automation tasks like negotiation, advising, or complex problem-solving. Interestingly, training also raises engagement in high-automation tasks (e.g., manual dexterity), but the effect is much smaller.

[5] Robustness: Using US repeated cross sections (2012&2017) and German panel data (2012&2015), we control for pre-training automation risk. Results show that past automation risk predicts current risk but has minimal impact on training estimates, confirming baseline findings.

[4] Leveraging within-occupation, within-industry variation and controlling for cognitive skills & many background characteristics, we find that job training reduces automation risk by 4.7 pp (-10%). This reduction explains 1/5 of the wage effect of training.

[3] Substantial variation in automation risk exists within occupations. Even those at opposite ends of the occupation-level automation risk spectrum show notable overlap in individual-level risk. This highlights the importance of going beyond existing occupation-level measures.

[2] We study whether job training helps workers upgrade their task portfolios, thus reducing their automation risk. Using PIAAC data from 90,000+ workers in 37 countries, we construct an individual-level measure of automation risk based on detailed information on job tasks.

[1] The fear of technology displacing workers has persisted since the Industrial Revolution. Advances in IT and robotics reignited this concern. But full occupations rarely vanish—automation often targets specific tasks, creating room for task upgrading by workers.

📢 New WP.Does job training reduce workers’ automation risk? And does its effectiveness vary by country, gender, or training type? We study these questions in a new WP (w/ Oliver Falck, @Mo_GuoYuchen, @Vlindlacher & @SimonWiederhold). A 🧵. CESifo WP:

RT @DigEconLab: Join us next Thursday 11/21 when @ProfDavidDeming of @Kennedy_School stops by the Lab to talk about the possible labor mark….

RT @Woessmann: 🚨My new paper:. 📰Skills and Earnings: A Multidimensional Perspective on Human Capital. reviews the….