Working Paper
Wage polarization in a high-inequality emerging economy
Earnings growth in South Africa displayed a U-shaped pattern across the earnings percentiles between 2000 and 2015, resembling wage polarization in the industrialized world. We investigate whether the drivers of this example of wage polarization in...
Working Paper
The role of skills and tasks in changing employment trends and income inequality in Chile
Using decomposition methods, we analyse the role of the changing nature of work in explaining changes in employment, wage inequality, and job polarization in Chile from 1992 to 2017. Changes in occupational structure confirm a displacement of workers...
Working Paper
Jobs, earnings, and routine-task occupational change in times of revolution
In this paper we investigate the links between wage inequality and the changing nature of jobs in a revolution context. The methodology consists of various decompositions and regressions, including recentred influence function regressions, based on...
Working Paper
Changes in occupations and their task content
The aim of this paper is to identify the scope and patterns of the structural transformation as evidenced by changes in occupations and their task content, and their impact on employment, earnings and income distribution in Argentina during the new...
Working Paper
Evolution of wage inequality in India (1983–2017)
We examine data for urban workers in the non-agricultural sector across three decades, 1983–2017, and find that earnings inequality increased during 1983–2004, was largely stable during 2004–11, and decreased during 2011–17. We explore whether...
Policy Brief
Tasks, skills, and institutions
Concerns about widening income inequality within countries continue to gain prominence in public debate worldwide. In the last decade, attention to the concentration of income at the very top of the distribution (top 1%) has increased. This...
Working Paper
Labour market polarization in South Africa
There is evidence from developed countries that technical change affects not only the employment intensity of production, but also the occupational composition of employment. The use of artificial intelligence, automation, and robots has changed the...
Working Paper
The global distribution of routine and non-routine work
Studies of the effects of technology and globalization on employment and inequality commonly assume that occupations are identical around the world in the job tasks they require. To relax this assumption, we develop a regression-based methodology to...
Working Paper
Implications of the changing nature of work for employment and inequality in Ghana
In this paper, we analyse the role of the changing nature of occupational employment and wages in explaining the trend in earnings inequality in Ghana between 2006 and 2017, a period in which there was a substantial transformation of the economy...
Working Paper
Polarization in the South African labour market
Technical change impacts both the employment intensity of production and the composition of occupations and skills of employment. Artificial intelligence, automation, and robots are already leading to machines undertaking routinizable tasks...