Part 2 of 2
Task-Based Theories of Production
Occupations as task bundles, comparative advantage, endogenous task assignment, applications to skills and capital, automation, new tasks, and equilibrium wages.
This second part of the course develops the canonical task-based model of production, which allows us to study the effects of automation on labor demand and the distribution of income between labor and capital. The key for us is to distinguish between the amounts of inputs used in production and what they do in production. This adds a new layer of substitutability between inputs as tasks can be reassigned from one input to another in response to changes in prices or technology. The main sources for this part of the course are the lecture notes and the following references: Acemoglu and Autor (2011), Restrepo (2024), and Acemoglu et al. (2025).