The Growth of Low-Skill Service Jobs and the Polarization of the US Labor Market
研究了1980至2005年间低技能服务职业的增长与美国就业和工资极化现象，提出消费者偏好与自动化成本下降的相互作用是极化根源，并用空间均衡模型验证了四个推论。
We offer a unified analysis of the growth of low-skill service occupations between 1980 and 2005 and the concurrent polarization of US employment and wages. We hypothesize that polarization stems from the interaction between consumer preferences, which favor variety over specialization, and the falling cost of automating routine, codifiable job tasks. Applying a spatial equilibrium model, we corroborate four implications of this hypothesis. Local labor markets that specialized in routine tasks differentially adopted information technology, reallocated low-skill labor into service occupations (employment polarization), experienced earnings growth at the tails of the distribution (wage polarization), and received inflows of skilled labor.