Job Polarization in the U.S.: A Reassessment of the Evidence from the 1980s and 1990s

In this paper, we review the evidence for job polarization in the U.S. and provide a description of the occupational employment changes that characterized the U.S. labor market during the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s. We begin by replicating the existing job polarization trends, which are produced using a modified occupational coding scheme intended to make occupational categories comparable over time. Using two alternative procedures to obtain consistent occupational codes across decades, we show that the finding that jobs polarized in the 1990s relative to the 1980s no longer holds. Instead, we find that occupational employment shifts were very similar during the two decades. In addition, we demonstrate that the method used to rank occupations according to their skill content has a substantial impact on the employment growth in low-skill job categories. Finally, using an additional occupational crosswalk that allows us to obtain consistent occupational categories from 1970 to 2002, we provide evidence in favor of a long-term trend towards employment growth in high-skill jobs and employment decline in some middle-skill jobs, but no sharp contrast between the 1980s and the 1990s. Our findings suggest that the evolution of the occupational employment structure and the divergent wage growth patterns observed during the 1980s and 1990s do not easily fit within the routinization story as usually told.