Task-Biased Changes of Employment and Remuneration: The Case of Occupations

Stephan Kampelmann and Francois Rycx

No 5470, IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)

Abstract: Different empirical studies suggest that the structure of employment in the U.S. and Great Britain tends to polarise into "good" and "bad" jobs. We provide updated evidence that polarisation also occurred in Germany since the mid-1980s until 2008. Using representative panel data, we show that this trend corresponds to a task bias in employment changes: routine jobs have lost relative employment, especially in predominantly manual occupations. We further provide the first direct test for whether task-biased technological change affects employment and remuneration in the same direction and conclude that there is no consistent task bias in the evolution of pay rules. By contrast, compositional changes like the proportion of union members are clearly associated with long-term changes in the remuneration of occupations.

Keywords: occupations; pay rules; technological change; polarisation; inequality; tasks (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J21 J24 J31 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 36 pages
Date: 2011-01
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-lab
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (20)

Published - published as 'The Dynamics of Task-biased Technological Change: The Case of Occupations' in: Brussels Economic Review, 2013, 56 (2)

Downloads: (external link)
https://docs.iza.org/dp5470.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Task-Biased Changes of Employment and Remuneration: The Case of Occupations (2011)
Working Paper: Task-Biased Changes of Employment and Remuneration: The Case of Occupations (2011)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:iza:izadps:dp5470

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
IZA, Margard Ody, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA) IZA, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Holger Hinte ().