Meng Liu, "The Rising Importance of Initiative Skills in the Labor Market"
Abstract: As IT and automation increasingly replace routine labor with machines, the tasks remaining for the average human are more dynamic, complex, and volatile. In this study, we highlight the value of initiative skills - the ability to get things started and get things done - and show that they are increasingly demanded and rewarded in today’s labor market. Using data from O*NET and BLS, we demonstrate that there has been a positive and significant growth in both employment and real wage of occupations requiring high initiative skills over the period of 2000-2015, while the opposite occurred for low-initiative jobs. We go further by combining occupational-level measures from O*NET and individual-level attributes from NLSY97 to show that individuals with high initiative/grit are more likely to sort themselves into occupations requiring higher initiative skills, and that these individuals earn higher returns in the labor market measured by higher wages (with Erik Brynjolfsson and George Westerman).
Biography: Meng joined the IDE as a post-doctoral associate in September 2015. Her research interests include the sharing economy, IT and labor market dynamics, and mechanism design. Aiming to understand the role and impact of ride-sharing platforms, she combines data on Taxi, Uber, and Lyft to estimate market demand for rides and calculates consumer welfare gain from these ride-sharing platforms. She is also interested in how IT impacts the labor market in the second machine age, and particularly, how initiative skills make individuals more competitive in the labor market. Besides, she has done work on multi-attribute procurement auctions, where she uncovers sources of inefficiencies and suggests better designs of innovative buying schemes.
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