Publications
Publications
Job Mobility and Assortative Matching (with Wolfgang Dauth and Duncan Roth), ILR Review, forthcoming.
IZA Discussion Paper | IAB Discussion Paper
with Johannes Seebauer and Matteo Targa
This paper examines the evolution of wage inequality in Germany from 1985 to 2020. To capture the heterogeneity in wage dynamics, we distinguish worker wages across 265 industrial sectors and four task-based occupational classes, yielding 993 industry-by-occupation cells that can be consistently observed over the 35-year period. During this time, total wage variance increased by 9 log points, with half of the rise driven by widening differences between 22 cells. These comprise either non-routine abstract workers in high-tech industries or non-routine manual workers in low-paying retail sectors. The central role of these 22 key cells in explaining the overall increase in wage inequality reflects a combination of strong employment concentration, rising polarization in relative earnings, and increased assortative matching.
Adding to the work by Atalay et al. (2024), I examine job specialization and task demand by labor market size. I also accounting for the firm dimension of job specialization. Using job ads posted on the job portal of the Federal Employment Agency in Germany, that can be linked to administrative data sets, I calculate measures for task intensity and job specialization. I find that large markets and firms of high quality have a higher demand for non-routine abstract tasks and a lower demand for routine tasks. Lastly, I show that large markets and high quality firms offer jobs that are more specialized. This also holds when comparing jobs of the same narrowly defined occuptions. Together, the findings suggest that the distribution of firms across markets can account for substantial part of the differences in job tasks across space.