Lousy and Lovely Jobs: The Rising Polarization of Work in Britain

2007/02/01 by Maarten Goos, Alan Manning · 401 citations
Economics, Econometrics and Finance · Engineering · Health Professions · #Economics #Employment and Welfare Studies #Engineering #Happening #History #Labor market dynamics and wage inequality #Labour economics #Performance art #Polarization (electrochemistry) #Wage #Work (physics)

paper · open access · doi:10.1162/rest.89.1.118

published in The Review of Economics and Statistics 89(1), 118-133 (The MIT Press)

openalex publication_date 2007/02/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/23

Abstract

This paper shows that the United Kingdom since 1975 has exhibited a pattern of job polarization with rises in employment shares in the highest- and lowest-wage occupations. This is not entirely consistent with the idea of skill-biased technical change as a hypothesis about the impact of technology on the labor market. We argue that the “routinization” hypothesis recently proposed by Autor, Levy, and Murnane (2003) is a better explanation of job polarization, though other factors may also be important. We show that job polarization can explain one-third of the rise in the log(50/10) wage differential and one-half of the rise in the log(90/50).

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