Job Polarization in Europe

The structure of employment is always changing, and economists are always trying to understand those changes. In the 1990s the idea of skill-biased technological change (SBTC) was used to understand the shift in employment toward more educated workers (see David H. Autor and Lawrence F. Katz 1999, for a survey). However, in recent years, it has become appar ent that a more nuanced approach is needed. The idea of SBTC might lead one to predict a uni form shift in employment away from low-skilled and toward high-skilled occupations, but studies for the United States (Autor, Katz, and Melissa S. Kearney 2006) and the United Kingdom (Goos and Manning 2007) have shown that there is growth in employment in both the…