2022/10/14 by Miriam Koomen, Uschi Backes-Gellner, Uschi Backes‐Gellner
Economics, Econometrics and Finance · Health Professions · Mathematics · Social Sciences · #Distribution (mathematics) #Econometrics #Economics #Efficiency wage #Employment and Welfare Studies #German #Inequality #Labor market dynamics and wage inequality #Labour economics #Mathematics #Retirement, Disability, and Employment #Task (project management) #Wage #Wage inequality
paper · doi:10.1016/j.labeco.2022.102284
openalex publication_date 2022/10/14 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
We study the role of occupational tasks as drivers of West German wage inequality. We match administrative wage data with longitudinal task data, which allow us to account for within-occupation changes in task content over time. We run RIF regression-based decompositions to quantify the contribution of changes in the returns to tasks to overall changes in the wage distribution from 1978 to 2006. We find that changes in the returns to tasks explain up to half of the increase in wage inequality since the 1990s, both at the top and the bottom of the wage distribution. Specifically, abstract tasks drive the upper wage gap, while interactive and routine tasks drive the lower wage gap. Importantly, we find low-wage occupations to have the highest routine task intensity. The association between occupational tasks and West German wage inequality is thus both stronger and different than prior research has found.