Events

Impending technological innovation, such as self-driving trucks, threatens occupations like truck drivers with sudden obsolescence. Using a bare-bones overlapping generations model, we examine an occupation facing such possible obsolescence. Employers must pay ‘obsolescence rents,’ with fewer and older workers remaining in the occupation. We study teamsters at the dawn of the motor truck, current occupations threatened by computerization, and truckers dreading robotic trucks. As predicted, wages in threatened occupations rise, employment falls, and the occupations become ‘grayer’. Older workers become more likely to enter and less likely to exit the occupations than younger ones and sometimes even increase in number.