How General Is Human Capital? A Task‐Based Approach

By Christina Gathmann, Uta Schönberg. Journal of Labor Economics, 2010

703 citations recorded by the source corpus.

This article studies how portable skills accumulated in the labor market are. Using rich data on tasks performed in occupations, we propose the concept of task‐specific human capital to measure empirically the transferability of skills across occupations. Our results on occupational mobility and wages show that labor market skills are more portable than previously considered. We find that individuals move to occupations with similar task requirements and that the distance of moves declines with experience. We also show that task‐specific human capital is an important source of individual wage growth, accounting for up to 52% of overall wage growth.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/c726925ddf53e0a6fbcfd8f21c485f3205c989f5

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Citations in the corpus

Skills, Tasks and Technologies: Implications for Employment and Earnings. NBER Working Paper No. 16082. (2010, neutral): “Such measures are available in the German IAB / BIBB survey used by DiNardo and Pischke ( 1997 ) , Spitz - Oener ( 2006 ) , Dustmann , Ludsteck and Schonberg ( 2009 ) , and Gathmann and Schönberg ( 2010 ) among others .”
Environmental Regulation and Green Skills: An Empirical Exploration (2018, background): “These occupation-speci ﬁ c features are particularly relevant in light of skill similarity at the job, rather than industry, level (Gathmann and Schönberg 2010).”
Learning Your Comparative Advantages (2014, background): “Gathmann and Schönberg (2010) provide evidence that tenure in the previous occupation also affects the current wage, while emphasizing the importance of task tenure in wage formation. quality to occupations.11 In addition to the above-mentioned differences in predictions, Miller’s (1984) setup…”
The “task approach” to labor markets: an overview (2013, background): “Subsequent work by SpitzOener (2006), Dustmann et al. (2009), Antonczyk et al. (2009), Black and Spitz-Oener (2010), and Gathmann and Schönberg (2010), along with other recent studies that are too numerous to list here, used the job activity questions in the IAB/BIBB data to measure job tasks and…”
The Career Costs of Children (2017, neutral): “thors, including Heckman and Willis (1976), Ward and Butz (1980), Rosenzweig and Schultz (1983), Wolpin (1984), Moffitt (1984), Rosenzweig and Schultz (1985), Hotz and Miller (1988) Cigno and Ermisch (1989), Blackburn, Bloom, and Neumark (1990), Hotz and Miller (1993), Leung (1994), Arroyo and Zhang”
Multidimensional Skills, Sorting, and Human Capital Accumulation (2020, methodology): “6 We propose a more parsimonious random search model, in which the only shocks 5Models of experimentation and learning following on from Jovanovic (1979) such as Neal (1999); Pavan (2011); Golan and Antonovics (2012) have been useful to make sense of the patterns of between and within occupation swi”
Do Green Jobs Differ from Non-Green Jobs in Terms of Skills and Human Capital? (2016, methodology): “Gathmann and Schonberg (2010) employ a similar method to measure the loss of occupation-specific human capital due to job-to-job transitions.”
Where Have the Middle-Wage Workers Gone? A Study of Polarization Using Panel Data (2016, background): “12 Meanwhile Gathmann and Schonberg (2010) and Poletaev and Robinson (2008) provide evidence that human capital has an important task-specific component.”
The Specificity of General Human Capital: Evidence from College Major Choice (2015, result): “Similar to Carneiro et al. ð2003Þ, Cunha et al. ð2005Þ, Guvenen and Smith ð2010Þ, or Navarro ð2011Þ, testing the information set of the agent is essentially equivalent to testing whether the individuals’ choices are a function of the human capitals or their expected values.”
Inter-industry labor flows (2017, methodology): “For instance, relatedness matrices such as the skill-relatedness matrix in this paper have various practical and academic applications, ranging from employment and retraining programs to research in labor economics (Poletaev and Robinson, 2008; Gathmann and Schönberg, 2010), economic geography (Port”