What Makes New Work Different from More Work?
David Autor, Caroline Chin, Anna Salomons, Bryan Seegmiller · Annual Review of Economics · 26 May 2026
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Where this sits in the debate
- Will AI destroy more jobs than it creates? · its finding goes against the claim (why studies differ)
Direction of the finding as read from the abstract by an AI model (AI-written).
Abstract
We study the role of expertise in new work—novel occupational roles that emerge as technological and economic conditions evolve—using newly available 1940 and 1950 Census Complete Count files and confidential American Community Survey data from 2011 to 2023. We show that new work is systematically distinct from simply more work in existing occupations in four respects. First, it attracts workers with distinct characteristics: New work is disproportionately performed by younger and more educated workers, even within detailed occupation-industry cells. Second, new work commands economically significant wage premiums that persist beyond workers’ initial entry into new work, consistent with returns to scarce, specialized expertise rather than temporary market disequilibrium. Third, these premiums decline across vintages as expertise diffuses, with “newer” new work commanding larger premiums than older new work. Fourth, the emergence of new work can be traced to specific demand shocks in particular locations and time periods, suggesting that expertise formation responds systematically to economic opportunities. These findings suggest that new work serves as a countervailing force to automation-driven job displacement not merely by creating additional employment but also by generating new domains of human expertise that command market premiums. This expertise-based mechanism helps explain both the expanding variety of work activities across decades and the historical resilience of the labor share.
About this publication
Leading field journal. A leading journal in economics or a neighbouring field (on the Tinbergen Institute’s A list or near the top of the RePEc ranking), or a top-rated computer-science venue.
Placed by: Leading field journal. How sources are ranked.
- Published
- 2026 (5 months ago)
- Citations
- 0 (OpenAlex)
0 citations recorded by OpenAlex — too few 2026 papers in this collection for a fair comparison.
Anna Salomons, Bryan Seegmiller, David Autor signed the wemustactnow.ai letter · author affiliation matches seed institutions massachusetts institute of technology, northwestern university, tilburg university — part of why this paper is in the collection.
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