Polarization in the labour market
This projects departs from the observations in Asplund et al. (2011), who documented a process of polarization in the occupational structure of the Nordic countries in the period from 1995 to 2005. First we establish to what extent this polarization trend is still going on. We rank occupations by their median wage in the beginning of the period (2004) and then study the employment trajectories of occupations in the different parts of the occupational wage distribution. These developments are linked to changes in technology. Technological change may change the demand for different types of jobs differnentially, for instance along the dimensions of routineness of the jobs or by educational requirements.
The next step is to decompose this development by regions, with a particular focus on urban versus rural areas of Norwary. We consider both changes in the distribution of occupations within regions with different population densities, and across regions. One hypothesis may be that the process of polarization is led by the development of labor demand in the big cities.
