Mabel Sánchez Barrioluengo presents the paper "Low-skill employment in Spanish Local Labour Markets" (coauthored with Davide Consoli) at the 2015 Regional Studies Association Conference in Piacenza (Italy).
The presentation contributes to the debate on the influence of technological change on labour with an empirical study of the evolution of employment in Spanish local labour markets. It builds on and contributes to existing literature by disentangling the structural changes of employment in Spain and gauging how these effects play out across different geographical areas. Their estimates indicate that the increase in service employment is stronger in provinces with the highest shares of educated workers (at least college education). Another finding is that the share of ROU employment in the previous decade is a robust predictor of the growth of NRM jobs. Lagged unemployment levels have a negative association with low-skill service employment, which suggests the prominence of structural factors rather than a business cycle effect. Lastly, low-skill job growth is higher among provinces with stronger HC creation capacity. These results are robust to the inclusion of instrumental variables that take into account the long-term pattern of industrial specialization of each local labour market.