New Frontiers: The Origins and Content of New Work, 1940–2018
David Autor, Caroline Chin, Anna Salomons, Bryan Seegmiller · The Quarterly Journal of Economics · 15 Mar 2024
Where this sits in the debate
- Will AI destroy more jobs than it creates? · its finding: it depends (why studies differ)
Direction of the finding as read from the abstract by an AI model (AI-written).
Abstract
Abstract We answer three core questions about the hypothesized role of newly emerging job categories (“new work”) in counterbalancing the erosive effect of task-displacing automation on labor demand: what is the substantive content of new work, where does it come from, and what effect does it have on labor demand? We construct a novel database spanning eight decades of new job titles linked to U.S. Census microdata and to patent-based measures of occupations’ exposure to labor-augmenting and labor-automating innovations. The majority of current employment is in new job specialties introduced since 1940, but the locus of new-work creation has shifted from middle-paid production and clerical occupations over 1940–1980 to high-paid professional occupations and secondarily to low-paid services since 1980. New work emerges in response to technological innovations that complement the outputs of occupations and demand shocks that raise occupational demand. Innovations that automate tasks or reduce occupational demand slow new-work emergence. Although the flow of augmentation and automation innovations is positively correlated across occupations, the former boosts occupational labor demand while the latter depresses it. The demand-eroding effects of automation innovations have intensified in the past four decades while the demand-increasing effects of augmentation innovations have not.
About this publication
Top journal. One of the journals economics departments rank highest: the “top five” economics journals, and the general-science journals Science and Nature.
Placed by: Top five economics journals. How sources are ranked.
- Published
- 2024 (32 months ago)
- Citations
- 182 (OpenAlex)
Citations in context
182 citations — 91st percentile among the 23 indexed papers from 2024 in this collection. Citation counts favor older papers; this compares only same-year papers here, not the whole literature.
□ added to this collection in 2026.
Anna Salomons, Bryan Seegmiller, David Autor signed the wemustactnow.ai letter · author affiliation matches seed institutions massachusetts institute of technology, northwestern university — part of why this paper is in the collection.
Cited elsewhere in this guide
Related by theme, not necessarily by method or conclusion.
- The Effects of Generative AI on High Skilled Work: Evidence from Three Field Experiments with Software Developers
SSRN · 2024 - GPTs are GPTs: An Early Look at the Labor Market Impact Potential of Large Language Models
arXiv · 2023 - Extending “GPTs Are GPTs” to Firms
AEA Papers and Proceedings · 2025 - What Makes New Work Different from More Work?
Annual Review of Economics · 2026
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