Research

Workforce Age Structure and Frontier Technology Adoption: Evidence from New Software Releases

with Sabrina Peng

Paper (PDF)

Abstract
This paper provides causal evidence that aging slows technology adoption and sheds light on why. Using Lightcast job postings, we track local adoption of 15 software technologies following their releases, instrumenting local age composition with a Bartik-style measure based on historical age structure and national survival rates. Employers in older labor markets post increasingly fewer vacancies requiring the newest software: at year 4, a one-standard-deviation increase in the older-worker share reduces new-technology postings by about 15% of pre-release legacy postings share. The gap is also larger for more difficult technologies, which we measure using new LLM-based difficulty indices. We then develop a model to separate three potential channels through which aging affects technology adoption: shorter work horizon, legacy technology experience loss, and reduced learning efficiency. Removing experience loss reduces the age adoption gap by about 88%, more than removing differences in horizons or learning efficiency. The model also shows that policies affecting workforce age structure have different implications for adoption. Relative to replacement-level fertility with retirement at 70, and assuming zero net migration, a total fertility rate of 1.6 lowers aggregate adoption by 7.5%, whereas raising the retirement age to 75 has almost no effect.

Perceived Education Returns Abroad and Investment at Home

with Emma Naslund-Hadley, Siu Yuat Wong, and Qianyao Ye

Abstract
Migration is a central economic strategy for many Central American households, and the possibility of migration can shape educational investment long before migration occurs by changing how households perceive the returns to schooling. In a household survey conducted in El Salvador, we find that caretakers of children ages 8 to 12 substantially overestimate wages in the United States, especially for workers with secondary schooling, by more than 300 percent. Caretakers also overestimate the return to education in the United States relative to El Salvador, and these perceived U.S. returns are strongly associated with the amount of time parents spend helping children with schoolwork. Building on this evidence, the project studies how perceived returns to education abroad, perceived migration costs and barriers, and domestic education returns jointly affect children's schooling investments and household migration decisions. The empirical design uses a randomized information experiment with caretakers of school-age children in El Salvador, who receive experimentally varied information about U.S. wages for Salvadorans, migration success probabilities, wage uncertainty, and returns to education in El Salvador. The experiment measures how these treatments change beliefs, migration intentions, and willingness to invest in supplemental education. The project tests a central mechanism in the brain-gain hypothesis: whether the possibility of migration raises education investment before migration occurs.

Patterns of Invoicing Currency in Global Trade: New Evidence

with Emine Boz, Camila Casas, Georgios Georgiadis, Gita Gopinath, Helena Le Mezo, and Arnaud Mehl

Journal of International Economics, vol. 136, 103604 (2022)