June 10: Owen

The nature of production has changed in important ways. Firms are increasingly able to replace parts of the production process performed by domestic workers with foreign workers or machines. Importantly, firms are strategic and in the face of greater barriers to global production, will increase automation (and vice versa). Therefore, we cannot understand political economy today without considering how firms utilize different production strategies (automation or global production) in the face of policy bundles. In this paper, I provide an integrated theory of the labor market implications of global production and automation using the tasks framework. Workers in certain occupations are more vulnerable to the negative labor market consequences created by these forces.  Thus occupation-characteristics are an important determinant of workers’ preferences across multiple policy areas. I hypothesize that workers exposed to automation and globalization will be more protectionist with respect to globalization, more likely to favor government redistribution, and support a left party or right-wing populist party.  I find support for these claims using ISSP data from 1995 to 2016.