Eminent Speaker Series: Prof. Anna Salomons - ONLINE ONLY

Join us for this Eminent Speaker Series afternoon webinar.  Professor Anna Salomons will discuss what makes new work different from more work, with ESA's National President, Professor Robert Breunig.

Abstract

This talk presents new insights on the role of expertise in new work - defined as novel occupational roles that have emerged as technological and economic conditions evolved, based on newly available 1940 and 1950 Census Complete Count files and confidential America Community Survey data from 2011-2023. New work is found to be systematically distinct from simply more work in existing occupations in four respects.

• First, it attracts workers with distinct characteristics: new work is disproportionately performed by younger and more educated workers, even within detailed occupation-industry cells.
• Second, new work commands economically significant wage premiums that persist beyond workers' initial entry into new work, consistent with returns to scarce, specialized expertise rather than temporary market disequilibrium.
• Third, these premiums decline across vintages as expertise diffuses, with 'newer' new work commanding larger premiums than older new work.
• Fourth, the emergence of new work can be traced to specific demand shocks in particular locations and time periods, suggesting that expertise formation responds systematically to economic opportunities.

These findings suggest that new work serves as a countervailing force to automation-driven job displacement not merely by creating additional employment, but also by generating new domains of human expertise that command market premiums. This expertise-based mechanism helps explain both the expanding variety of work activities across decades and the historical resilience of the labor share.

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About our Speaker

Anna Salomons is an Instituut Gak endowed professor at Utrecht University’s School of Economics and a professor at Tilburg University's Department of Economics. She is also a Research Fellow at IZA, the Centre for Economic Policy Research (CEPR), the Technology & Policy Research Initiative at Boston University, the Block Center for Technology and Society at Carnegie Mellon University, and the Shaping the Future of Work Initiative at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Her research explores various labor market topics, with a focus on the labor market impacts of technological change, including consequences for earnings levels and inequality, employment and the job structure, and skill demand and supply. In 2024, she received the European Economic Association's Role Models in Economics Award. 

Information

When: Thursday 18 June 2026
Time: From 4.00pm until 5.00pm AEST (check the time where you are)
Where: Online via Zoom
Cost: Free of Charge for members / $10 for non-members - remember to login prior to avoid the non-member fee.

Registration and Joining this Webinar

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The timing of this event is AEST (SYD/CBR/MEL).  View ESA Central Council's Code of Conduct