Andre Assumpcao

In this interview article, we embark on a fascinating journey through time alongside the winners of the 2023 DRUID Best Paper Award. DRUID, an annual research conference renowned as the hub of cutting-edge research on innovation and the dynamics of structural, institutional, and geographic change, bestows this award on the most innovative and exceptional conference submission. As longstanding allies of DRUID, Industry and Innovation offers an exclusive peek behind the curtains, unveiling the untold stories that underlie award-winning research.

In 2023, this coveted DRUID prize was awarded to a paper by Ljubica Nedelkoska, Shreyas Gadgin Matha, James McNerney, Andre Assumpcao, Dario Diodato, and Frank Neffke. Their work stands out through an impressive data collection effort and the exploration of a compelling and urgent research question – how technological change has impacted the gender pay gap. Throughout this interview, the author team takes us down memory lane, retelling the story behind their research project. On this journey through time, we trace the genesis of the authors’ innovative ideas and the intricate pathways they navigated in their quest to understand the past as a means of unravelling the future of work and its implications for gender inequality in the labour market. This journey not only takes us back in time but also points to potential avenues for future research and open questions that lie ahead.

We build a new longitudinal dataset of job tasks and technologies by transforming the U.S. Dictionary of Occupational Titles (DOT, 1939 -1991) and four books documenting occupational use of tools and technologies in the 1940s, into a database akin to, and comparable with its digital successor, the O*NET (1998 -today). After creating a single occupational classification stretching between 1939 and 2019, we connect all DOT waves and the decennial O*NET databases into a single dataset, and we connect these with the U.S. Decennial Census data at the level of 585 occupational groups. We use the new dataset to study how technology changed the gender pay gap in the United States since the 1940s. We find that computerization had two counteracting effects on the pay gap -it simultaneously reduced it by attracting more women into better-paying occupations, and increased it through higher returns to computer use among men. The first effect closed the pay gap by 3.3 pp, but the second increased it by 5.8 pp, leading to a net widening of the pay gap.

As part of the "Role of the Diaspora in the Internationalization of the Colombian Economy" project, Growth Lab researchers surveyed 11,500 members of the Colombian diaspora, located in well over 100 countries. They studied the migration journeys, the diaspora’s attachment to Colombia, the level of diaspora engagement and interest in engaging, the intentions to return back home, the interest in diaspora government policy, and the overall sentiment of the diaspora towards Colombia.

We studied the geography as well as the demographic and socio-economic characteristics of 1.7 million members of the global Colombian diaspora (34% of the total estimated Colombian diaspora) using census and survey data from major host countries, and 3.5 million Twitter users located around the world presumed to be of Colombian origin. We also studied the locations and industries of Colombian senior managers and directors outside Colombia, using a global database of over 400 million companies. Moreover, we studied the migration journeys, the diaspora’s attachment to Colombia, the level of diaspora engagement and interest in engaging, the intentions to return back home, the interest in diaspora government policy, and the overall sentiment of the diaspora towards Colombia, through a survey which received 11,500 responses from the diaspora in well over 100 countries in less than two months. We additionally interviewed 12 Colombian transnational entrepreneurs and professionals, to understand what attracts them professionally to Colombia, and what may stand in the way of more diaspora engagement and professional growth.