This Job is ‘Getting Old:’ Measuring Changes in Job Opportunities using Occupational Age Structure

In both the U.S. and the OECD, highand low-paying occupations expanded relative to middle-wage occupations during the 1990s and 2000s. We explore changes in the age structure of occupations as a means to analyze the reallocation of workers from middleskill occupations towards the tails of the distribution. We posit that occupations typically expand by hiring young workers and contract by curtailing such hiring. Growing occupations should therefore become on average younger while shrinking occupations should age. Data for the 1980 through 2005 period strongly support this contention. The mean age of workers in ‘middle-skilled’ occupations rose significantly relative to either high or low-skilled occupations after 1980. We apply this empirical tool to local labor markets to test whether markets that were initially specialized in middle-skilled occupations in 1980 saw a movement of both older and younger workers into expanding–but potentially lower-skilled and lower-paying–jobs over the subsequent 25 years. We find that employment in these labor markets is increasingly clustered in the upper and lower tails of the occupational skill distribution. For non-college workers, losses at the middle are almost entirely countered by growth in lower-tail occupations. For college workers, occupational reallocation occurs towards both the upper and lower tail of the distribution. Upward reallocation is, however, far more pronounced among younger college workers, and is almost non-existent for the old. Consequently, older college workers are increasingly found in lower-skill, lower-paying occupations.