Firm training, automation, and wages: International worker-level evidence

Firm training is often touted as a key safeguard against automation, but robust micro-level evidence remains limited. In this paper, Oliver Falck, Yuchen Guo, Christina Langer, Valentin Lindlacher, and Simon Wiederhold use harmonized data on more than 90,000 workers across 37 industrialized countries to show that firm-provided training significantly reduces individual automation risk and explains a meaningful share of its wage returns.

Why More Companies Are Recognizing the Benefits of Keeping Older Employees

Annie Coleman reveals that although age bias is still the norm, some employers are starting to tap into the value-add of their most experienced (and yes, older) workers.

Why Professors Fear the Future

Academic life has barely changed in 40 years. Why? The faculty likes it that way.

Are You Building Something?

An interview with Marshall Ganz on what the social sector gets wrong about power and structural change

Who is responsible for Americans’ lifelong employability?

Mitchell Stevens recently spoke with Julian Alssid and Kaitlin LeMoine about the future of work and learning for the Work Forces podcast. It's a great listen around the need to transition from a schooled society that centers early-life classroom experiences and academic credentials, to a learning society that recognizes human talent grows everywhere across the entire arc of lengthening lives.

Why ’65’ Isn’t the Magic Number for Retirement Anymore

The old system is broken. People are living much longer and they need—and want—to work later in life to make the numbers add up. Besides, you can only spend so much time on the golf course.

When A.I. Took My Job, I Bought a Chain Saw

Brian Groh reflects on how artificial intelligence has begun to erode his work as a copywriter. Turning to a chatbot for career advice, he receives an unexpected and unsettling suggestion.

A 1 Percent Solution to the Looming A.I. Job Apocalypse

The threat of artificial intelligence doesn’t only present a job crisis. It creates an education challenge. The problem isn’t that people can’t work. It’s that we haven’t built systems to help them continue learning and connect them to new opportunities as the world changes rapidly.

New Approaches to Characterize Industries: AI as a Framework and a Use Case

Recent AEI research unites economists, data scientists and policy experts to solve a critical problem: measuring AI's true impact on jobs and skills. With traditional systems failing to track generative AI's rapid spread, this compendium presents innovative strategies — including talent-flow models and new skill frameworks — to inform smarter workforce and economic policy.

How should we talk about workforce investment? With Rachel Lipson.

SCL Futures Fellow (2024-2025) and Resident Scholar at the Aspen Economic Strategy Group Rachel Lipson argues that workforce development should be reframed from an individualized anti-poverty social policy into a public good similar to R&D investment, prioritizing critical industries and job quality to benefit the entire economy rather than targeting specific disadvantaged populations.