David Autor is one of the world’s leading labor economists and has been described as “the academic voice of the American worker.”

His scholarship explores the labor-market impacts of technological change and globalization on job polarization, skill demands, earnings levels and inequality, and electoral outcomes. Autor’s research has shaped economic and public understanding of the impact of globalization and technological change on jobs and earning prospects. He has shown that computerization increased skill-based wage premia in the US by requiring rapid skill upgrading, thereby increasing the labor demand for college graduates relative to workers without tertiary education as well as the wage premium associated with a college degree.

His work also demonstrated that computerization spurred a “polarization” of job growth in industrialized countries into traditionally high-wage and traditionally low-wage occupations at the expense of middle-skill blue-collar production and white-collar office jobs, fomenting decades of rising inequality.