SPEAKER: Mike Handel (Bureau of Labor Statistics, USDOL, Research Analyst)
TITLE:  "Occupational Projections, Automation, and the Future of Work"

If you missed the seminar, or want to review Mike Handel's excellent presentation, here's a link to the Zoom Video Recording. 
Content questions can be addressed to <m.handel@northeastern.edu>

ABSTRACT: The impressive growth in the power of artificial intelligence since 2005 has spawned a raft of papers and analyses that seek to identify occupations threatened by automation in the near future.  The most widely cited estimate is that nearly half of all U.S. jobs are at risk of automation over a ten- to twenty-year period.... Read more about Seminar in the Economics of Science & Engineering - "Occupational Projections, Automation, and the Future of Work"

SPEAKER:  William F. Maloney (World Bank, Chief Economist, Equitable Growth, Finance and Institutions) 
TITLE: “Engineering Growth: Innovative Capacity and Development in the Americas" (paper joint with Felipe Valencia Caicedo) 
ABSTRACT: 
This paper offers the first systematic historical evidence on the role of a central actor in modern growth theory - the engineer. We collect cross-country and state level data on the population share of engineers for the Americas, and county level data on engineering and patenting for the US during the Second Industrial Revolution. These are robustly correlated with income today after controlling for literacy, other types of higher order human capital (e.g. lawyers, physicians), demand side factors, and instrumenting engineering using the Land Grant Colleges program. We support these results with historical case studies from the US and Latin America.

Haris Tabakovic (Harvard Business School and The Brattle Group) 
Paper: “From Revolving Doors to Regulatory Capture? Evidence from Patent Examiners" (paper joint with Thomas Wollmann, University of Chicago)

ABSTRACT:  Many regulatory agency employees are hired by the firms they regulate, creating a “revolving door” between government and the private sector. We study these transitions using detailed data from the US Patent and Trademark Office. We find that patent examiners grant significantly more patents to the firms that later hire them, that much of this leniency extends to prospective employers, and that these effects are strongest in years when firms are actively hiring. Ultimately, this leads the agency to issue lower quality patents, which we measure in citations. We argue these results are suggestive of regulatory capture.

Economics of Science and Engineering Workshop

SPEAKER:  John Helveston ( Institute for Sustainable Energy at Boston University)
SEMINAR TITLE: Vehicle Electrification in China: Preferences, Policy, and Technology Trajectories

Paper 1: Will subsidies drive electric vehicle adoption? Measuring consumer preferences in the U.S. and China 
... Read more about Vehicle Electrification in China: Preferences, Policy, and Technology Trajectories

Ariel D. Stern 
(Harvard Business School)

Jason Gardner , CEO & President, and Christina Isacson, VP and Head of Business Development 

Economics of Science and Engineering Workshop
Given by: Richard Freeman (Harvard University and NBER), Jorn Boenke (Labor & Worklife Program, Harvard Law School), and Maggie Cheng (Stanford University) 

Cell phones are a product with continual innovation that have impacted lives around the world.  American adults spend 2 hours 51 minutes on their smartphone every day.  This paper analyzes the changing attributes of cell Phones in the two largest economies in the world, USA and China.  It uses hedonic price regressions to assess the speed of innovative change from data on prices matched with the attributes of new and older models.  It assesses the impact of innovations on cell phones on consumer well-being and assesses the seeming inconsistency between micro data on products with improved technological features and macro data that show sluggish growth of GDP per capita in the US.