Computers as Stepping Stones? Technological Change and Equality of Labor Market Opportunities

Melanie Arntz; Cäcilia Lipowski; Guido Neidhöfer; Ulrich Zierahn - Weilage

doi:10.1086/727490

Computers as Stepping Stones? Technological Change and Equality of Labor Market Opportunities

Melanie Arntz
, Cäcilia Lipowski^*
, Guido Neidhöfer
, Ulrich Zierahn - Weilage

^*Corresponding author for this work

Leibniz Centre for European Economic Research in Mannheim
Centre for European Economic Research (ZEW)

Research output: Contribution to journal › Article › Academic › peer-review

Abstract

This paper analyzes whether technological change improves equality of labor market opportunities by increasing the returns to skills relative to the returns to parental background. We find that in Germany during the 1990s, the introduction of computer technologies improved the access to technology-adopting occupations for workers with low-educated parents and reduced their wage penalty within these occupations. We also show that this significantly contributed to a decline in the overall wage penalty experienced by workers from disadvantaged parental backgrounds over this time period. Competing mechanisms, such as skill-specific labor supply shocks and skill upgrading, do not explain these findings.

Original language	English
Pages (from-to)	503-543
Number of pages	41
Journal	Journal of Labor Economics
Volume	43
Issue number	2
Early online date	18 Aug 2023
DOIs	https://doi.org/10.1086/727490
Publication status	Published - Apr 2025

Bibliographical note

Publisher Copyright:
© 2025 The University of Chicago. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC 4.0), which permits non-commercial reuse of the work with attribution. For commercial use, contact [email protected].

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Computers as Stepping Stones? Technological Change and Equality of Labor Market Opportunities

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