Technological change, occupational tasks and the distribution of work earnings: the Brazilian case

• Grant number: 14/26243-0
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Master
• Start date: May 01, 2015
• End date: December 31, 2015
• Field of knowledge: Applied Social Sciences - Economics
• Agreement: Coordination of Improvement of Higher Education Personnel (CAPES)
• Principal Investigator: Sergio Pinheiro Firpo
• Grantee: Flávio Luiz Russo Riva
• Host Institution: Escola de Economia de São Paulo (EESP). Fundação Getúlio Vargas (FGV). São Paulo , SP, Brazil

Abstract

In this project, we propose to explore a particularity of the Brazilian industrial policy on the computer sector to investigate whether technological change, as implied by the massive adoption of computer technology in the labor market, alters the way by which tasks are priced and, ultimately, the distribution of work earnings. With the end of the market reserve policy in 1991, labor markets in Brazil experienced an abrupt and exogenous shock in the price of computers, constituting a perfect scenario to study the causal links between technological change and the structure of labor demand. Our main objective is to see if the evidence in favor of the "routinization hypothesis" is generalizable to a developing economy, and we believe that it is possible to benefit from the aforementioned particularity in Brazilian history to argue that the causal force behind most models of technological change that incorporate tasks is an accurate description of the Brazilian case. Departing from microeconomic models of such type, we propose to empirically access the hypothesis that workers in occupations more intensive in routine tasks have suffered a decline in real work earnings and workers in occupations that are more intensive in non-routine tasks have experienced an opposite effect. The analysis would follow conventional procedures of statistical inference based on the econometrics of cross-section and panel data. (AU)