 Within Occupation Wage Dispersion and the Task Content of JobsOxford Bulletin of Economics and Statistics, 2020, vol. 82, issue 5, 1161-1197 Abstract: Most analyses linking task content of jobs to income inequality focus on the effects between occupations, e.g. the growing dispersion between lousy and lovely jobs. The theory, meanwhile, provides insights on links between task content of jobs and inequality also within occupations: models predict compression of wages in more routine jobs, that is those where capital is a direct substitute for labour, and an increase in dispersion in jobs where capital and labour are complements. I document that within occupations dispersion of wages is empirically relevant, as it represents around half of total wage inequality across Europe. I then link wage inequality to the task content of jobs. Using matched employee–employer data from Europe for the period 2002–14, I show that occupations where tasks complement newer technologies exhibit higher wage dispersion. This relationship is robust to adjusting for a variety of confounding and mitigating channels. Date: 2020 Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:bla:obuest:v:82:y:2020:i:5:p:1161-1197 Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from Access Statistics for this article Oxford Bulletin of Economics and Statistics is currently edited by Christopher Adam, Anindya Banerjee, Christopher Bowdler, David Hendry, Adriaan Kalwij, John Knight and Jonathan Temple More articles in Oxford Bulletin of Economics and Statistics from Department of Economics, University of Oxford Contact information at EDIRC. |
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