2019/15 LEM Working Paper Series

Routinization, Within-Occupation Task Changes and Long-Run Employment Dynamics

Davide Consoli, Giovanni Marin, Francesco Rentocchini and Francesco Vona
  Keywords
 
tasks; routinization; technological change; employment dynamics; race between technology and education


  JEL Classifications
 
J23, J24, O33.
  Abstract
 
The present study contributes to the existing literature on routinization and employment by capturing within-occupation task changes over the period 1980-2010. The main contributions are the measurement of such changes and the combination of two data sources on occupational task content for the United States: the Dictionary of Occupational Titles and the Occupational Information Network. We show that within-occupation task change: i) accounts for 1/3 of the decline in routine-task use; ii) accelerates in the 1990s, decelerates in the 2000s but with significant catching-up; iii) is associated with educational upgrading in several dimensions and iv) allows one to escape the employment decline conditional on initial routine-task intensity.
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