Georg Graetz

Is Modern Technology Responsible for Jobless Recoveries?

Using country-industry panel data across 17 countries and covering more than 70 recessions, Georg Graetz, together with Guy Michaels, shows that outside the US, recent recoveries have not become more "jobless", and that industries that were more exposed to new technologies have not suffered from slower recoveries. Thus, evidence from outside the US suggests that technology is not causing jobless recoveries in developed countries outside the US. More research is needed to understand whether differences in labour market policies might explain differences in the emergence of jobless recoveries across countries.

Mr Graetz' current research uses Swedish administrative data to address questions in labour economics as well as in the economics of education and human capital. In a project that is just getting started (joint with Per-Anders Edin, Uppsala, and Guy Michaels, LSE), he investigates the consequences of technology-driven occupational decline for individual workers. This project seeks to understand how career trajectories and life-time earnings are affected by technologies that threaten to make an occupation obsolete, such as automated teller machines, word processing software or industrial robots. A second current project uses quasi-random variation in SAT scores to predict exogenous variation in college attendance and to estimate the opportunity costs of college (joint with Björn Öckert and Oskar Nordström Skans, both Uppsala). A third current project documents the simultaneous decline of teachers' cognitive and non-cognitive skills and their relative wages in Sweden from 1985–2013, and attempts to establish a causal role for wages in the decline of skills (joint with Michael Böhm, Bonn, and Esteban Aucejo, Arizona State)

Georg Graetz is an assistant professor in the Economics Department at Uppsala University (since 2014). He is also a research affiliate at IZA, an associate at the Centre for Economic Performance, a researcher at the Uppsala Center for Labor Studies and a member of the Economics of Higher Education network. He obtained his PhD in Economics in 2014 and a BSc in Econometrics and Mathematical Economics in 2009, both from the London School of Economics.