Labor-Market Adjustment to Technological Change: The Role of Occupational Accessibility
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Series
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Speaker(s)Sara Signorelli (École polytechnique – CREST, France)
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FieldEmpirical Microeconomics
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LocationErasmus University Rotterdam, Campus Woudestein, Langeveld 3.16
Rotterdam -
Date and time
September 17, 2026
12:00 - 13:00
Abstract
Technological change requires workers to reallocate across occupations, but it may also reshape how easily they can do so by changing occupational skill requirements. We exploit digitalization during the 2010s to study this mechanism. We measure occupational accessibility by comparing occupational skill requirements in job-posting data. Combining these measures with French matched employer–employee data, we find that occupations becoming more similar in their digital skill profiles experience greater worker mobility. Counterfactual simulations based on a structural two-sided matching model indicate that changes in occupational accessibility generate worker reallocation amounting to 21 percent of that generated by observed labor-demand shifts. Joint paper with Arnaud Dupuy and Morgan Raux.