Frank Levy

Massachusetts Institute of Technology | MIT · School of Architecture and Planning

I project the near-term future of work to ask whether job losses induced by artificial intelligence will increase the appeal of populist politics. The paper first explains how computers and machine learning automate workplace tasks. Automated tasks help to both create and eliminate jobs and I show why job elimination centres in blue-collar and cler...

Considering a program for cross-disciplinary research between computer scientists and economists studying the effects of computers on work.

From the mid-1940s through the 1970s, median wages and productivity growth rose in tandem. Since the 1980s productivity continued to grow steadily while wages stagnated. In this paper we document these trends, explore the reasons for these divergent trends, and outline a mix of policy, institutional, and organizational changes needed to restore wag...

As the current recession ends, many workers will not be returning to the jobs they once held--those jobs are gone. In The New Division of Labor, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane show how computers are changing the employment landscape and how the right kinds of education can ease the transition to the new job market. The book tells stories of people...

The growth in the use of advanced imaging for Medicare beneficiaries decelerated in 2006 and 2007, ending a decade of growth that had exceeded 6 percent annually. The slowdown raises three questions. Did the slowdown in growth of imaging under Medicare persist and extend to the non-Medicare insured? What factors caused the slowdown? Was the slowdow...

Medical imaging is a large and growing component of health care expenditures. To better understand some of the determinants of imaging ordering behavior, the authors analyzed the effect of differential capacity on the imaging workup of patients with acute nonhemorrhagic stroke. All patients at a US teaching hospital and a two-campus Canadian teachi...

We examine the reasons why one might expect it to be more difficult to offshore professional work than manufacturing work in a globalized world. We then provide data on the variations in a specific case - the offshoring of diagnostic radiology from the USA, UK and Singapore. We show that existing theories on the 'offshorability' of jobs have not ca...

I want to thank Steven Seltzer and the Brigham radiology community for the opportunity to speak today. The invitation is both an honor and a responsibility. It is an honor to follow the distinguished group of previous Abrams Lecturers: John Wennberg, Marcia Angel, Norman Shumway and Margaret Marshall, to name a few. The responsibility is to say som...

This paper places the competencies to be measured by the OECD’s Programme for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC) in the context of the technological developments which are reshaping the nature of the workplace and work in the 21st century. The largest technological force currently shaping work is the computer. Computers are...

A rising tide lifts all the boats. John F. Kennedy, October 15, 1960 Simultaneous and identical actions of United States Steel and other leading steel corporations, increasing steel prices by some 6 dollars a ton, constitute a wholly unjustifiable and irresponsible defiance of the public interest. John F. Kennedy, April 11, 1962 INTRODUCTION This c...

Over the next decade, computers will augment the supply of radiology services at a time when reimbursement rules are likely to tighten. Increased supply and slower growing demand will result in a radiology market that is more competitive, with less income growth, than the market of the past 15 years.

One of the implicit promises of capitalism is that, as output per hour of work increases, its beneits are shared by business and labor. In a recent paper, MIT economists Frank Levy and Peter Temin show that the relationship no longer holds. Productivity has grown more rapidly than wages since the 1970s. The authors argue that the reason may well be...

Contrary to popular opinion, only one Indian firm - about a dozen radiologists in total - now reads medical images generated in the United States. The Indian teleradiology industry is having somewhat greater success in the United Kingdom and Singapore but even here, success is slow. In this paper, I discuss the Indian teleradiology industry and des...

We provide a comprehensive view of widening income inequality in the United States contrasting conditions since 1980 with those in earlier postwar years. We argue that the income distribution in each period was strongly shaped by a set of economic institutions. The early postwar years were dominated by unions, a negotiating framework set in the Tre...

PURPOSE Despite enormous media attention, no more than about fifteen radiologists in India now read medical images sent from U.S. hospitals. The Indian radiology industry is making modestly greater progress in the U.K. and Singapore, but even here the results are modest. This limited progress is best explained by a combination of basic factors and...

We discuss teleradiology and medical image reconstruction from the perspectives of both India and its client countries. Radiology isan “extreme” professional service with extensive usage oftacit rather than codifiedknowledge. The importance of tacit knowledge leads to long training periods, a limited globalsupply of radiologists and

While struggling with the current pressures of educational reform, some educators will ask whether their efforts make economic sense. Questioning the future makeup of the nation's workforce, many wonder how the educational system should be tempered to better prepare today's youth. This chapter answers educators' and parents' questions around the ef...

Two recent trends have rekindled interest in questions about the impact of technological change on the skills that workers use at their jobs and the wages these skills command. The first is the increase in education-related earnings inequality. Between 1980 and 1998 the college-high school wage differential rose from 48 to 75 percentage points, a 5...

This chapter examines the major shifts in the global marketplace, and advocates more widespread and diverse training in higher-level skills. It looks at the impact of globalization and the computerization of work on labour markets, addressing the role of computerized work in substituting human work and identifying the educational implications of to...

Empirical work has been limited in its ability to directly study whether skill re-quirements in the workplace have been rising, and whether these changes have been related to technological change. This paper answers these questions using a unique data set from West Germany that enables me to look at how skill requirements have changed within occupa...

Brookings Trade Forum 2005 (2005) 411-423 The observation quoted above appeared when offshoring was rapidly entering the public consciousness. The author chose a dramatic example. At the time, economists argued that while technology made the offshoring of some work inevitable, the United States could still prosper with a sufficiently educated workf...

Both the skill-biased technological change hypothesis and the over-education hypothe-sis are consistent with the observed increased proportion of high-educated employees, but each has different predictions regarding occupational skill requirements. The analysis dis-tinguishes between these two hypotheses by investigating the changing occupational s...

The 1990s, particularly the last half of the decade, presented a special challenge to the conventional wisdom. Few would have asserted that unemployment could be pushed much below (or possibly even to) 5.5 or 6.0 percent without an unacceptable acceleration in the rate of price inflation. This consensus came from the acceptance of the Phillips curv...

We apply an understanding of what computers do to study how computerization alters job skill demands. We argue that computer capital (1) substitutes for workers in performing cognitive and manual tasks that can be accomplished by following explicit rules; and (2) complements workers in performing nonroutine problem-solving and complex communication...

We apply an understanding of what computers do to study how computerization alters job skill demands. We argue that computer capital (1) substitutes for workers in performing cognitive and manual tasks that can be accomplished by following explicit rules; and (2) complements workers in performing nonroutine problem-solving and complex communication...

Inequality has social costs: it may engender political divisions, aggravate crime, and lead low-income families into poverty from which they or their children may not emerge. Dramatic shifts in relative well-being therefore demand attention. In the late 1980s, economists discovered that the earnings of high- and low-wage workers were rapidly diverg...

Assessing the differing impacts of a new computer technology on skills and pay in two departments of a large bank.

Many studies document a positive correlation between workplace computerization and employment of skilled labor in production. Why does this correlation arise? The authors posit that improvements in computer-based technology create incentives to substitute machinery for people in performing tasks that can be fully described by procedural or "rules-b...

In this paper, we develop an econometric model to estimate the impacts of Electronic Vehicle Management Systems (EVMS) on the load factor (LF) of heavy trucks using data at the operational level. This technology is supposed to improve capacity utilization by reducing coordination costs between demand and supply. The model is estimated on a subsampl...

Over the last eighteen years, changes in the American economy have dramatically increased the skills workers need to earn a middle-class living. However, almost half of American students now leave high school without the requisite skills. The mismatch between the growing skill demands of employers and the skills of graduating students creates a nee...

It is human nature to search for "magic bullets" that promise to improve performance without painstaking effort - but choice plans, charter school programs, and school-based management initiatives are not magic bullets, Messrs. Murnane and Levy warn. These approaches will contribute to better schooling only if they stimulate change based on the Fiv...

In most developing countries, income inequality tends to worsen during initial stages of growth, especially in urban areas. The People’s Republic of China (PRC) provides a sharp contrast where income inequality among urban households is lower than that among rural households. In terms of inclusive growth, the existence of income mobility over a lon...

Using data from two longitudinal surveys of American high school seniors, the authors show that basic cognitive skills had a larger impact on wages for twenty-four-year-old men and women in 1986 than in 1978. For women, the increase in the return to cognitive skills between 1978 and 1986 accounts for all of the increase in the wage premium associat...

Both the growing college/high school earnings gap and the generally slow growth of real earnings have generated frustration with the political system. in the short run the earnings gap is likely to remain at roughly its current level. Over time, however, the increased concentration of low income households in poor school districts could perpetuate...

Since unification, the debate about Germany's poor economic performance has focused on supply-side weaknesses, and the associated reform agenda sought to make low-skill labour markets more flexible. We question this diagnosis using three lines of argument. First, effective restructuring of the supply side in the core advanced industries was carried...

In 1969, R. Frish and J. Tinbergen received the first Nobel Price in Economics. 200 years after Quesnay's "economic tables", economics were at last considered as a science. During the last thirty years, economics haven't lost their scientific reputation, but, confronted with different situations in the world and in France, economics have been unabl...

Since 1972, high-school-educated males have experienced a dramatic decrease in labor market earnings, making them the first generation since World War II to experience a lower standard of living than their fathers. In this article, Richard Murnane and Frank Levy examine this downward trend in earnings, citing the shift in job opportunities from man...

The abstract for this document is available on CSA Illumina.To view the Abstract, click the Abstract button above the document title.

This paper explores the consequences of cognitive dissonance, coupled with time-inconsistent preferences, in an intertemporal decision problem with two distinct goals: acting decisively on early information (vision) and adjusting flexibly to late information (flexibility). The decision maker considered here is capable of manipulating information to...

Since 1973, U.S. wage rates have shown slow growth bordering on stagnation. During this period, the real annual earnings distribution of prime age men has shown both little average growth and increased inequality. The distribution of real annual family incomes has similarly shown little average growth and increased inequality. By contrast, the dist...

This paper examines the growing college premium for younger men and the earnings patterns for other groups that developed between 1973 and 1987. At first glance, the rapidly increasing college premium for young men seems to confirm several frequently cited economic trends, including a massive restructuring of the economy that displaces all less edu...

This essay presents an overview of events and circumstances that contributed to California's property tax reform initiative. The consequences of Proposition 13 and its implications for the rest of the country are discussed. (EB)

This paper presents an approximate method for estimating the labor supply function of female household heads who may or may not be receiving Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC). Estimation results indicate that any AFDC parameter change which increases a program's breakeven income will reduce expected hours of work in the population. In...

This paper observes that analyses of the process of decentralization often fail to recognize that constraints are imposed by the nature of the organization being examined. In particular, the analysis of an organization producing economic goods can be misleading if applied, without qualification, to organizations producing government goods. Taking a...