Structural change: consequences and policy responses

This program is a concerted effort to, on the one hand, understand the consequences of structural change for wage inequality, job loss, and occupational mobility; and, on the other hand, evaluate policies according to their effectiveness in facilitating workers´ adjustment to structural change.

The program is situated within the research environment of the Uppsala Center for Labor Studies (UCLS), which brings together Swedish and international researchers.

Across industrialized countries, the nature of work has undergone profound changes in the past four decades, including shifts in occupational and sectoral employment, continuing urbanization, and changes in the organization of workplaces.

Our goal is to understand how these changes have affected workers´ capacity to earn a living, via for instance the distribution of wages or the incidence of disruptive events such as job loss.

Furthermore, we want to understand whether existing policies, such as job search assistance and retraining, are effective in helping workers adjust to structural change. We also evaluate the case for innovative policies, such as job recommendations based on AI-technology.

The program will leverage high-quality Swedish adminstrative data covering inter alia the universe of worker-fim matches. It also involves novel data collection efforts, for instance the surveying of firms´ technology use.

The program uses state-of-the-art econometric methods, in many cases developed or improved by the program participants themselves.

The program features quasi-experimental methods, machine learning techniques, theoretically-motivated identification strategies, as well as field experiments.