Occupational Tasks and Changes in the Wage Structure

By Sergio Firpo, Nicole M. Fortin, Thomas Lemieux. Social Science Research Network, 2011

435 citations recorded by the source corpus.

This paper argues that changes in the returns to occupational tasks have contributed to changes in the wage distribution over the last three decades. Using Current Population Survey (CPS) data, we first show that the 1990s polarization of wages is explained by changes in wage setting between and within occupations, which are well captured by tasks measures linked to technological change and offshorability. Using a decomposition based on Firpo, Fortin, and Lemieux (2009), we find that technological change and deunionization played a central role in the 1980s and 1990s, while offshorability became an important factor from the 1990s onwards.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/216ab3b006698602091d52f87c05d9b018df0c5e

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Economics and Econometrics

Citations in the corpus

The China Syndrome: Local Labor Market Effects of Import Competition in the United States (2013, background): “See Lemieux (2006); Autor, Katz, and Kearney (2008); Beaudry, Doms, and Lewis (2010); Autor and Acemoglu (2011); Firpo, Fortin, and Lemieux (2011); and Autor and Dorn (2013) for recent work.”
Earnings Dynamics, Changing Job Skills, and STEM Careers* (2020, methodology): “…adapt more quickly or links a priori theories about the impact of computerization to shifts in relative employment and wages across occupations with different task requirements (e.g., Galor and Tsiddon 1997; Caselli 1999; Autor, Levy, and Murnane 2003; Firpo, Fortin, and Lemieux 2011; Deming 2017).”
Growing Income Inequality in the United States and Other Advanced Economies (2020, methodology): “2 For more detail on the IPUMS files, see Flood et al. (2000). Prior to the 1976 survey (income for 1975), the ASEC supplement only collected information at the individual level for heads of household.”
Where Have the Middle-Wage Workers Gone? A Study of Polarization Using Panel Data (2016, methodology): “college education used as a proxy for skills), and the extent to which it is explained by technology through changes in the relative demand of college and non-college workers (Goldin and Katz (2008), Katz and Murphy (1992), Boudarbat, Riddell, and Lemieux (2010)), or by the intensity of capital use ”
Decomposing Wage Distributions using Recentered Influence Function Regressions (2018, background): “These results justify the increased attention given in the literature to the role of occupational tasks (Firpo et al. 2011; Fortin and Lemieux 2016).”
The Skill Complementarity of Broadband Internet (2015, background): “8See also Autor, Katz and Kearney (2006, 2008), Goos and Manning (2007), Black and Spitz-Oener (2010), Firpo, Fortin, and Lemieux (2011), Acemoglu and Autor (2011), Autor and Dorn (2013), and Michaels, Natraj, and Van Reenen (forthcoming).”
Explaining Job Polarization: Routine-Biased Technological Change and Offshoring (2014, neutral): “They are excluded here because the quality of wage data by country, occupation, and time is poor and because of concerns about their endogeneity (see Firpo, Fortin, and Lemieux 2011 and Ebenstein et al. forthcoming for US evidence on this).”
Job Polarization and Jobless Recoveries (2020, background): “Routine jobs—both cognitive and manual—tend to occupy the middle of the occupational wage distribution (see, for instance, Autor (2010), Firpo et al. (2014), and Goos et al.”
Italian Workers at Risk During the COVID-19 Epidemic (2020, background): “Building up on the literature that studies the labour market effects of technological change and classifies occupations according to their tasks (Autor et al., 2003; Firpo et al., 2011; Autor and Dorn, 2013), this paper contributes to the characterization of economic activities along dimensions of r”