No. 231: Technology Exposure and Jobs

When firms adopt new technologies, which organizational margins adjust within multi-unit firms? We use 43 million job postings from 759 S&P~500 firms (2010-2022) to construct plant-year measures of delegation, performance measurement, cross-functional coordination, and values-alignment screening. We define job design standardization as the out-of-sample predictability of a plant’s job-design language from the firm’s other plants, and we show that design standardization has a firm component explaining roughly a quarter of the variation. Technology exposure is associated with more coordination and values-alignment language in high-standardization plants, but not in low-standardization plants; delegation and performance measurement do not respond directly to exposure but are complements within plants, with steeper complementarity in high-standardization plants. The most distinctive pattern concerns growth in the number of postings: the standardization–exposure interaction is negative for plant-specific exposure and positive for industry-wide exposure.