Changes in Occupational Tasks and Their Association with Individual Wages and Occupational Mobility

Abstract

This study provides novel evidence on the relevance of task content changes between and within occupations to wage dynamics of occupational changers and stayers. I use individual‐level, cross‐sectional data featuring tasks performed on the job to compute a measure of proximity of job contents. Then, I merge this measure to a large‐scale panel survey to show that occupational changers experience a wage growth that is declining when the accompanying alterations in task contents are big. For occupational stayers, alterations in task contents generate a positive wage component, beyond tenure effect. However, the results are not robust with respect to the choice of proximity measure and over time.