arXiv subjects

Nicolaj Søndergaard Mühlbach

Publications and source records attributed to Nicolaj Søndergaard Mühlbach.

4 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2022

The long-term effect of childhood exposure to technology using surrogates

We study how childhood exposure to technology at ages 5-15 via the occupation of the parents affects the ability to climb the social ladder in terms of income at ages 45-49 using the Danish micro data from years 1961-2019. Our measure of technology exposure covers the degree to which using computers (hardware and software) is required to perform an occupation, and it is created by merging occupational codes with detailed data from O*NET. The challenge in estimating this effect is that long-term outcome is observed over a different time horizon than our treatment of interest. We therefore adapt the surrogate index methodology, linking the effect of our childhood treatment on intermediate surrogates, such as income and education at ages 25-29, to the effect on adulthood income. We estimate that a one standard error increase in exposure to technology increases the income rank by 2\%-points, which is economically and statistically significant and robust to cluster-correlation within families. The derived policy recommendation is to update the educational curriculum to expose children to computers to a higher degree, which may then act as a social leveler.

econ.EM↗

arXiv2022

The Rise of Age-Friendly Jobs

In 1990, one in five U.S. workers were aged over 50 years whereas today it is one in three. One possible explanation for this is that occupations have become more accommodating to the preferences of older workers. We explore this by constructing an "age-friendliness" index for occupations. We use Natural Language Processing to measure the degree of overlap between textual descriptions of occupations and characteristics which define age-friendliness. Our index provides an approximation to rankings produced by survey participants and has predictive power for the occupational share of older workers. We find that between 1990 and 2020 around three quarters of occupations have seen their age-friendliness increase and employment in above-average age-friendly occupations has risen by 49 million. However, older workers have not benefited disproportionately from this rise, with substantial gains going to younger females and college graduates and with male non-college educated workers losing out the most. These findings point to the need to frame the rise of age-friendly jobs in the context of other labour market trends and imperfections. Purely age-based policies are insufficient given both heterogeneity amongst older workers as well as similarities between groups of older and younger workers. The latter is especially apparent in the overlapping appeal of specific occupational characteristics.

econ.GN↗

arXiv2022

occ2vec: A principal approach to representing occupations using natural language processing

We propose \textbf{occ2vec}, a principal approach to representing occupations, which can be used in matching, predictive and causal modeling, and other economic areas. In particular, we use it to score occupations on any definable characteristic of interest, say the degree of \textquote{greenness}. Using more than 17,000 occupation-specific text descriptors, we transform each occupation into a high-dimensional vector using natural language processing. Similar, we assign a vector to the target characteristic and estimate the occupational degree of this characteristic as the cosine similarity between the vectors. The main advantages of this approach are its universal applicability and verifiability contrary to existing ad-hoc approaches. We extensively validate our approach on several exercises and then use it to estimate the occupational degree of charisma and emotional intelligence (EQ). We find that occupations that score high on these tend to have higher educational requirements. Turning to wages, highly charismatic occupations are either found in the lower or upper tail in the wage distribution. This is not found for EQ, where higher levels of EQ are generally correlated with higher wages.

econ.EM↗

arXiv2021

Tree-based Synthetic Control Methods: Consequences of moving the US Embassy

We recast the synthetic controls for evaluating policies as a counterfactual prediction problem and replace its linear regression with a nonparametric model inspired by machine learning. The proposed method enables us to achieve accurate counterfactual predictions and we provide theoretical guarantees. We apply our method to a highly debated policy: the relocation of the US embassy to Jerusalem. In Israel and Palestine, we find that the average number of weekly conflicts has increased by roughly 103\% over 48 weeks since the relocation was announced on December 6, 2017. By using conformal inference and placebo tests, we justify our model and find the increase to be statistically significant.

econ.EM↗