Tasks, occupations and wages in OECD countries

Abstract

authors would like to acknowledge useful comments made by Steve McIntosh regarding an earlier draft. They are also grateful to the Managing Editor of the International Labour Review and to two anonymous reviewers for their valuable suggestions on a previous version of the manuscript. Usual disclaimers apply.Responsibility for opinions expressed in signed articles rests solely with their authors, and publication does not constitute an endorsement by the ILO.

Returns to Routine Job Tasks in the German Labour Market: An Instrumental Variables Approach

“…The framework is based on the Roy's (1951) model of self-selection and is motivated by the observation that occupational assignment of workers is not random, but rather determined by comparative advantage. The model makes several predictions for the relationship between job tasks and wages, and some of the predictions are empirically tested in Autor and Handel (2013), Agasisti, Johnes and Paccagnella (2021), Saltiel (2019) and Rohrbach-Schmidt (2019). To study the relationship between job tasks and wages, the authors of these papers typically estimate Mincerian-like wage equations augmented with task measures and interaction terms between worker-level and occupation-level task measures.…”

“…From econometric perspective, there are numerous challenges associated with the estimation of the returns to tasks. First, the assignment of workers to occupations and tasks is not random, but is systematically related to observable individual characteristics such as gender, race, education (Autor and Handel, 2013), cognitive skills (Agasisti, Johnes and Paccagnella, 2021;Deming, 2017), and unobservable individual characteristics such as innate ability (Cortes, 2016) and preferences 2 . Failing to account for such observable and unobservable factors, especially when these are correlated with individual wages, will produce biased estimates of the returns to tasks.…”

Current Challenges Affecting the Development of Human Resources in Slovakia

“…However, few data sets contain information on job tasks, defined as 'a unit of work activity that produces output' (Autor, 2013), and most systematic attempts to capture tasks performed at work from an international perspective do not cover all EU Member States and are dated. Data scarcity has resulted in analyses of job content and skill demand relying on occupational or educational proxies, rather than data on actual tasks (Agasisti et al, 2021). Such approaches ignore the marked heterogeneity of tasks performed within occupations (Freeman et al, 2020;Fernandez-Macias and Bisello, 2022) or by workers with the same level of education, or commonalities between occupations and workers with different education levels (Autor, 2013).…”