Opening the Black Box: Task and Skill Mix and Productivity Dispersion

Glenn Blackwood, Cindy Cunningham, Matthew Dey, Lucia Foster, Cheryl Grim, John C. Haltiwanger, Rachel Nesbit, Sabrina Pabilonia, Jay Stewart, Cody Tuttle and Zoltán Wolf

No 30620, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: An important gap in most empirical studies of establishment-level productivity is the limited information about workers’ characteristics and their tasks. Skill-adjusted labor input measures have been shown to be important for aggregate productivity measurement. Moreover, the theoretical literature on differences in production technologies across businesses increasingly emphasizes the task content of production. Our ultimate objective is to open this black box of tasks and skills at the establishment-level by combining establishment-level data on occupations from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) with a restricted-access establishment-level productivity dataset created by the BLS-Census Bureau Collaborative Micro-productivity Project. We take a first step toward this objective by exploring the conceptual, specification, and measurement issues to be confronted. We provide suggestive empirical analysis of the relationship between within-industry dispersion in productivity and tasks and skills. We find that within-industry productivity dispersion is strongly positively related to within-industry task/skill dispersion.

JEL-codes: C81 E23 O33 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022-11
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-eff, nep-ino, nep-lma and nep-tid
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Forthcoming: Opening the Black Box: Task and Skill Mix and Productivity Dispersion , G. Jacob Blackwood, Cindy Cunningham, Matthew Dey, Lucia Foster, Cheryl Grim, John C. Haltiwanger, Rachel L. Nesbit, Sabrina Pabilonia, Jay Stewart, Cody Tuttle, Zoltan Wolf. in Technology, Productivity, and Economic Growth , Basu, Eldridge, Haltiwanger, and Strassner. 2024

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Chapter: Opening the Black Box: Task and Skill Mix and Productivity Dispersion (2023)
Working Paper: Opening the Black Box: Task and Skill Mix and Productivity Dispersion (2022)
Working Paper: Opening the Black Box: Task and Skill Mix and Productivity Dispersion (2022)
Working Paper: Opening the Black Box: Task and Skill Mix and Productivity Dispersion (2022)
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