Job Polarization in Aging Economies

This paper extends on French data the previous findings on US data: employment and wage growth have been more important in the lower and upper tail of the job quality distribution. The originality of the paper is to argue that the diffusion of ICT cannot explain alone the polarization at the lower tail of the distribution. However, when combined with population aging, our framework predicts a progressive concentration of employment in the service sector. These results are confirmed by French data. In addition, we develop an analytical framework to shed light on the economic mechanisms behind our empirical finding. We lay stress on the Balassa effect on the supply side and aging on the demand side.