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The employment shift from occupations in the middle of the skill distribution towards those at the high and low ends is one of the most important trends to affect the US labor market over the past 30 years. Previous research has suggested that a primary driver of this job polarization is routine-biased technological change (RBTC) whereby new technologies substitute for middle-skill jobs and complement high-skill cognitive jobs. However a long theoretical literature suggests that adjustments to technological change may be more episodic. Whether adjustments to new technology are gradual or sudden is important for policy and understanding economic recovery. If adjustments are sudden and concentrated in downturns, large numbers of displaced workers may be left with the wrong skills for new modes of production.

This article highlights findings from a recent working paper (Hershbein and Kahn 2016) that investigates how the demand for skills in the US labour market changed during and after the Great Recession. It uses nearly all electronically posted job vacancies in 2007 and 2010-2015 collected by the analytics company Burning Glass Technologies and spatial variation in economic conditions. This evidence showed that skill requirements in job vacancy postings differentially increased in metropolitan statistical areas (MSAs) that were hit hard by the Great Recession, relative to less hard-hit areas, and that these differences across MSAs persist through the end of 2015. The increases are prevalent within occupations, more pronounced in the non-traded sector, driven by both within-firm upskilling and substitution from older to newer firms, accompanied by increases in capital stock, and are evident in realized employment. We argue that this evidence reflects the restructuring of production toward more skilled workers and routine-labor saving technologies, and that the Great Recession accelerated this process.

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We study variation in skill demands for professionals across firms and labor markets. We categorize a wide range of keywords found in job ads into ten general skills. There is substantial variation in these skill requirements, even within narrowly defined occupations. Focusing particularly on cognitive and social skills, we find positive correlations between each skill and external measures of pay and firm performance. We also find evidence of a cognitive social-skill complementarity for both outcomes. As a whole, the job skills have explanatory power in pay and firm performance regressions, beyond what is available in widely-used labor market data.

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We use job vacancy data collected in real time by Burning Glass Technologies, as well as initial unemployment insurance (UI) claims data to study the impact of [Coronavirus Disease 2019] COVID-19 on the labor market. Our data allow us to track postings at disaggregated geography and by detailed occupation and industry. We find that job vacancies collapsed in the second half of March and are now 30 per cent lower than their level at the beginning of the year. To a first approximation, this collapse was broad based, hitting all US states, regardless of the intensity of the initial virus spread or timing of stay-at-home policies. UI claims also largely match these patterns. Nearly all industries and occupations saw contraction in postings and spikes in UI claims, regardless of whether they are deemed essential and whether they have work from-home capability. The only major exceptions are in essential retail and nursing, the 'front line' jobs most in-demand during the current crisis.

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This paper measures the labor market consequences of graduating from college in times of higher unemployment, and studies how those consequences vary with the skill level and the occupational concentration of the college major. The authors find that early careers are disrupted by poor labor market conditions. A large recession at the time of graduation reduces earnings and wages by roughly 11 per cent and three per cent (respectively) in the first year, as well as reducing the probability of full-time employment. The report also finds that high-earning majors are somewhat sheltered when graduating into a recession relative to the average major, experiencing significantly smaller disadvantages in most labor market outcomes measured.

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