30 June 2023

An article by Benoit Dostie and Genevieve Dufour published in the Canadian Public Policy

Benoit Dostie, HEC Montreal Professor and CIRANO Fellow, Genevieve Dufour, CIRANO Director of Major Collaborative Projects and Mikhael Deutsch-Heng, published an article in the Canadian Public Policy Journal, one of Canada's leading economic and social policy journals.

The article, entitled Job Attributes and Occupational Changes: A Shift-Share Decomposition by Gender and Age Group for Canada, 2006-2016, is related to several studies carried out at CIRANO:

  • Deutsch-Heng, M., Dostie, B., & Dufour, G. (2022). Documenter l’évolution de la demande des compétences liées aux STIM (2022RP-03, Rapports de projets, CIRANO.) https://doi.org/10.54932/HAJN9336
  • Deutsch-Heng, M., Dufour, G. et Dostie, B. (2022). Évolution de la demande de compétences entre 2006 et 2016. Dans B. Dostie et C. Haeck (dir.), Le Québec économique 10. Compétences et transformation du marché du travail (13, p. 279-300). CIRANO. https://doi.org/10.54932/PNOA9028

 

Read the full article

 

Article summary:

Technological change has two first-order effects on the nature of work. First, new technologies can cause changes within workers’ occupations, and second, it can push workers to move between occupations. To quantify these effects, we match detailed occupational data from the 2006 and 2016 Canadian censuses to detailed data that associates each occupation with sets of tasks, activities, and skills required for that occupation. Our results show that the importance of attributes related to social interactions and non-routine cognitive tasks has increased significantly. Moreover, most of the increase occurred within narrowly defined occupations. Men were more affected by the observed changes than women.