On June 22, Prof. Ethan Lewis from Dartmouth College delivered an online lecture entitled New technologies, productivity, and jobs: the (heterogeneous) effects of electrification on US manufacturing. The lecture was presided over by Prof. Shuaizhang Feng, Dean of IESR.
Ethan Lewis is a Professor of Economics at Dartmouth College and a Research Associate with the National Bureau of Economic Research. His research investigates how U.S. labor markets adjust to immigration and to technological change, including how employers adapt their production technology to the local availability of immigrant workers. His findings have appeared in top economics journals, including American Economic Review, Quarterly Journal of Economics, Journal of Political Economy, American Economic Journal, and Review of Economics and Statistics.
Prof. Lewis and his co-authors reviewed the process of the electrification during the Second Industrial Revolution and utilized the a data set at the city-industry level in the United States from 1890 to 1940 to understand the impacts of electrification on productivity and employment.
The research points out that electrification induced rapid and long-lasting productivity gains as early as 1890s, much earlier than thought. The effects of such productivity gains on labor market were basically neutral – virtually no change in employment or fall in labor share. However, the arrival of electricity had heterogeneous impacts on the labor market, with fewer jobs for middle-skill craftsmen but more jobs for production workers.
The research also shows that electricity's effects vary according to the product market structure – in markets mainly composed of small firms, positive output and employment impacts were found while those with firms that were initially large, employment did not increase significantly.
Prof. Lewis interacted with the participants and answered their questions at the end of the lecture. IESR regularly invites internationally-renowned experts and scholars to deliver public lectures.
