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

Glenn Blackwood, Cindy Cunningham (), Matt Dey (), Lucia Foster, Cheryl Grim, John Haltiwanger, Rachel Nesbit, Sabrina Pabilonia, Jay Stewart, Cody Tuttle and Zoltán Wolf
Additional contact information
Cindy Cunningham: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics
Matt Dey: US Bureau of Labor Statistics
Cody Tuttle: University of Texas at Austin

No 15594, IZA Discussion Papers from IZA Network @ LISER

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.

Keywords: productivity; skills; tasks; manufacturing (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D24 J24 J31 L60 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 57 pages
Date: 2022-09
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-eff, nep-lma and nep-tid
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Published - published in: Susanto Basu, Lucy Eldridge, John Haltiwanger, and Erich Strassner (eds.), Technology, Productivity and Economic Growth, University of Chicago Press, 2025

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Related works:
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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