The report is framed around three broad questions: 1. What do we know now about equity of postsecondary access in Ontario and what are the key data sources that contribute to that understanding? 2. What do we need to know in order to design policies and programs that effectively address access‐related issues? 3. What are the relevant criteria for effective data infrastructure and models to which Ontario can look in order to expand policy‐relevant knowledge about equity of access? This project was based on 35 in‐depth interviews with leading researchers, institutional stakeholders, and policy actors, as well as an extensive literature review.

In the past twenty years, globalization has had both observable and intangible impacts on business and labor markets at the local level, that are of critical importance to communities and the people who inhabit them. While impacts of global economic change on local labor markets have been anticipated, there is little insight in the research literature into the empirical dynamics of the interrelationship between global economic change and local labor markets. This study examined the impacts of globalization on local labor markets through three lenses: (1) quantitative analysis of employment change in the Denver Metropolitan Region local labor market, (2) quantitative comparison of six other metropolitan regional labor markets across different geographies, and (3) a qualitative analysis of explicit reports by participants in the Denver Metropolitan local labor market (people in business, consulting, the public sector, and education). The main hypothesis of this study is that, in metropolitan areas where the forces of global economic change are at work, two proxy measures for globalization, foreign direct investment (FDI) and export trade, have a statistically significant relationship to changes in industry employment in local labor markets. Quantitative analysis used multiple regression to identify correlation between industry employment and FDI and export trade. Results indicate that there is a correlation in selected industries where the geographic factors of location provided an explanatory basis for the results. Qualitative analysis revealed that respondents have cautious optimism regarding the economic promise of globalization and still acknowledge the challenges that globalization brings into focus for the region's business, education and government stakeholders. It also demonstrated the differences in perspectives of the respondents from different roles: business owner, enterprise employee, educator, and government official. The study concludes that the data support the hypothesis in select industries where there are geographic advantages, but they do not support the generalization of the hypothesis to all cases where FDI or international export trade affect industry employment. The study further finds that each of the metros examined have unique regional economic development entities that partner to attract FDI and encourage international export trade.

This paper examines the distributional impact of capital account liberalization. Using panel data for 149 countries from 1970 to 2010, we find that, on average, capital account liberalization reforms increase inequality and reduce the labor share of income in the short and medium term. We also find that the level of financial development and the occurrence of crises play a key role in shaping the response of inequality to capital account liberalization reforms.

Apprenticeships are one of the few bipartisan ideas in the realm of workforce development, promising an alternative way of training skilled workers without requiring higher education. Instead of accumulating debt, students get to “earn while they learn.” President Obama offered tens of millions of dollars in grants to expand innovative apprenticeship programs,1 and President Trump recently issued an executive order making it easier for businesses to apply for apprenticeship approvals.

Business and civic leaders, educators, and policymakers of all stripes share concerns over the relentless erosion of America’s middle class and growing polarization of incomes. Most decry the loss of middle-class jobs and fear the corrosive effects such trends might wreak on the nation if left unchecked. At the heart of the issue is an oft-discussed anomaly: while millions of aspiring workers remain unemployed and an unprecedented percentage of the workforce report being underemployed, employers across industries and regions find it hard to fill open positions. The market for middle-skills jobs—those that require more education and training than a high school diploma but less than a four-year college degree—is consistently failing to clear. That failure is inflicting a grievous cost on the competitiveness of American firms and on the standard of living of American workers.

A defining question of our age is how AI will influence the workplace of the future and, thereby, the human condition. The dominant perspective is that the competition between AI and humans will be won by either humans or machines. We argue that the future workplace may not belong exclusively to humans or machines. Instead, it is better to use AI together with humans by combining their unique characteristics and abilities. In three experimental studies, we let humans and a state-of-the-art AI classify images alone and together. As expected, the AI outperforms humans. Humans could improve by delegating to the AI, but this combined effort still does not outperform AI itself. The most effective scenario was inversion, where the AI delegated to a human when it was uncertain. Humans could in theory outperform all other configurations if they delegated effectively to the AI, but they did not. Human delegation suffered from wrong self-assessment and lack of strategy. We show that humans are even bad at delegating if they put effort in delegating well; the reason being that despite their best intentions, their perception of task difficulty is often not aligned with the real task difficulty if the image is hard. Humans did not know what they did not know. Because of this, they do not delegate the right images to the AI. This result is novel and important for human-AI collaboration at the workplace. We believe it has broad implications for the future of work, the design of decision support systems, and management education in the age of AI.

The digital revolution is rapidly changing the composition of the workforce across economies. In particular, a confluence of improvements in a wide range of related technological areas, including sensors, machine learning, automation, and robotics, is making technology more labor-saving and potentially less job-creating.

Our London Futures insights series focuses on the London economy and what it needs to do to maintain and reinforce its position as a leading global business hub. Our latest report in the programme focuses on the challenges and opportunities that technology presents to London. The findings indicate that a significant shift is occurring in the labour market. Jobs that do not need to be done in London, or can be fully replaced by technology, will continue to leave the city. However, the job losses will be outweighed by new jobs requiring skills that involve creativity, complex problem-solving and high technical content. The report brings together research from Oxford Martin School academics Carl Benedikt Frey and Michael A Osborne on the potential impact of automation on jobs in the UK and London over the next two decades, and a Deloitte survey of 100 London based organisations, exploring the new jobs that will be created, the skills that will be needed, and the implications for current working practices.

In this new report, Oxford Martin School academics Dr. Carl Benedikt Frey and Associate Professor Michael Osborne examine a pressing subject increasingly in the headlines: the changing nature of innovation and work, and the associated implications for the future of employment and society more widely. We are also very pleased to say that this report marks the launch of the Oxford Martin Programme on Technology and Employment, a long-term programme of research at the University of Oxford supported by Citi that will focus on many of the areas covered in this report.