Can a Task-Based Approach Explain the Recent Changes in the German Wage Structure?

By Dirk Antonczyk, Bernd Fitzenberger, Ute Leuschner. Social Science Research Network, 2009

141 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Summary This paper investigates the changes in the German wage structure for full-time working males from 1999 to 2006. Our analysis builds on the task-based approach introduced by Autor et al. (2003), as implemented by Spitz-Oener (2006) for Germany, and also accounts for job complexity. We perform a Blinder-Oaxaca type decomposition of the changes in the entire wage distribution between 1999 and 2006 into the separate effects of personal characteristics and task assignments. In line with the literature, we find a noticeable increase of wage inequality between 1999 and 2006. The decomposition results show that the changes in personal characteristics explain some of the increase in wage inequality whereas the changes in task assignments strongly work towards reducing wage inequality. The coefficient effect for personal characteristics works towards an increase in wage inequality at the top of the wage distribution. The coefficient effect for the task assignments on the contrary shows an inverted U-shaped pattern. We conclude that altogether the task-based approach can not explain the recent increase of wage inequality in Germany.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, General Health Professions, Political Science and International Relations

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/57dd76b747d8e9c674fba65134b6dc874123d46e

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Citations in the corpus

Automation, skills use and training (2018, methodology): “For a concept of automatability in line with that developed by ALM, routine and non-routine tasks are identified following Antonczyk et al. (2008).”
Offshoring, Tasks, and the Skill-Wage Pattern (2013, background): “…degree of interactivity and the lowest 23Accordingly, our results also imply that task-specific offshoring effects are one potential source of the recent increase in wage inequality within skill groups that has been documented in, for example, Dustmann et al. (2009) and Antonczyk et al. (2009).”
Polarization and Rising Wage Inequality: Comparing the U.S. And Germany (2018, methodology): “Antonczyk et al. (2009) analyze the changes between 1999 and 2006 in the German wage structure of male workers and conclude that a task-based approach, based on task data as used in Spitz-Oener (2006), cannot explain the rise in wage inequality. Gernandt and Pfeiffer (2007) find that the increase in”