Changes in Returns to Task-Specific Skills and Gender Wage Gap

Abstract

How did skilled-biased technological change affect wage inequality, particularly between men and women? To answer that question this paper constructs a task-based Roy model in which workers possess a bundle of basic skills, and occupations are characterized as a bundle of basic tasks. The model is structurally estimated using the task data from the Dictionary of Occupational Titles and the PSID. The main empirical finding is that men have more motor skills than women, but the returns to motor skills have dropped significantly, accounting for more than 40% of the narrowing gender wage gap. Keywords: Roy model, task-based approach, occupational choice, skill-biased technological change, soft skills.

Immigrants’ Wage Performance in a Routine Biased Technological Change Era: France 1994–2012

“…This is a clear departure from the existing literature. Yamaguchi (2018); Warman and Worswick (2015); or Imai, Stacey, and Warman (2019) also analyzed changes in returns to skills but did not compute any resulting occupational changes. Adsera and Ferrer (2014) analyzed immigrant women's occupational choices but not how returns to skills impact these choices.…”

“…perform tasks that are less nonroutine manual (0.0789 versus 0.1589), more nonroutine abstract (0.9106 versus 0.1795), and less routine intensive (0.1104 versus 0.1795).18 We do not distinguish between analytical and interpersonal tasks within abstract tasks. As pointed out byYamaguchi (2018), it is difficult to separately identify their effects on wages using the DOT, because of their strong correlation. In addition,Yamaguchi (2010) stressed that interpersonal tasks may be not adequately measured by the DOT variables.Immigrants' Wage Performance / 631…”

The Impact of Body Weight on Occupational Mobility and Career Development

“…Most prior work in that literature has focused on the effects of individuals' weights on their wages, utilized static methods, and abstracted from modeling occupational choice (Cawley, 2004;Pagan and Davila, 1997;Johar and Katayama, 2012;Hamermesh and Biddle, 1994;Han et al, 2009). 6 Dynamic models of differences in occupational choice and wage differences have more often been utilized in examining the gender wage gap (e.g., Altug and Miller (1998); Gayle and Golan (2012); Eckstein and Lifshitz (2011);Flabbi (2010); Yamaguchi (2013)) and black-white wage gap (e.g., Keane and Wolpin (2000); Bowlus and Eckstein (2002); Lehmann (2013)). …”

“…5 Both the model and method follow in the dynamic discrete occupational choice literature (Keane and Wolpin, 1997;Altug and Miller, 1998;Lee, 2005;Lee and Wolpin, 2006;Flabbi, 2010;Sullivan, 2010;Gayle and Golan, 2012;Eckstein and Lifshitz, 2011;Yamaguchi, 2013;Baird, 2014). I construct indices of the intensity of mental, physical and social job requirements for each occupation to determine how the monetary and non-monetary costs of body weight in the workplace vary with these requirements.…”

Job Tasks, Time Allocation, and Wages

“…2 See, for example Poletaev and Robinson (2008), Gathmann and Schönberg (2010), Yamaguchi (2012Yamaguchi ( , 2015, Sanders (2017), Lise and Postel-Vinay (2015), Speer (2016), and Roys and Taber (2016).…”