The skill content of technological change.udSome conjectures on the role of education and job-training in reducingudthe timing of new technology adoption

摘要

This positional contribution has a twofold aim: the first is to explore the recent empiricaludliterature developed around the issue of how the adoption of new technologies within theudfirm has changed the skill requirements of occupations; the second is to conjecture on theudrelationship, and on the relative sign, between technology adoption and firm sponsored onthe-udjob training. The basic idea is that the time-consuming dimension of the adoptionudprocess plays a direct role both in determining the profitability of the investment in newudtechnology and in assessing the size of the productivity slowdown the firm eventuallyudoccurs after its introduction. On the extent that the timing of adoption depends on theudworkers’ skill composition and on the distance between the skills acquired for the job andudthe skills required by the job, the deep understanding of the interplay between theudmechanisms of human capital accumulation can be helpful in order for the firm to setudsuitable and efficient job-training strategies. During the last two decades the discussionudaround the impact of technological change on workers’ human capital has been intense: theudrapid diffusion of information and communication technologies (ICT) and computer-basedudmachines (CNC, CAD), together with the large increase in the supply of highly-educatedudworkers and rising returns to education, favoured the argument that technological change isudcharacterized by a skill-biased nature (SBTC), leading to substantial changes in the divisionudof labour and shifting labor demand towards employees with higher levels of education. Onudthis purpose, different approaches have developed in the last decades that provide differentudevidence to a common research question. While a lot of national and international evidenceudstill continues to support the SBTC hypothesis by employing ‘traditional’ aggregateudmeasures of technological change and indirect measures of skill upgrading, a smallerudliterature is emerging that considers the heterogeneity of both technologies and skills at theudworkplace and aims at determining the demand of skills by the tasks occupations require.udEven if new and interesting results emerge, many ‘black holes’ still remain, the mostudimportant of which seem to be the lack of theoretical and empirical models analyzing theudrole that school education and on-the-job training, and their interplay, can play in reducingudthe timing of new technology