Panel Paper:
The Evolving U.S. Occupational Structure: A Textual Analysis
*Names in bold indicate Presenter
in the US between 1960 and 2000, and quantify its implications for earnings inequality.
We construct a new dataset, drawing on a rich and largely untapped source of data:
the text content of newspaper job ads. A previous literature has found that over this
40 year period, the employment share of occupations centered around offshorable and
routine tasks (especially routine manual tasks) has declined, while the employment
share of jobs with non-routine interactive tasks has increased. We document that the
evolution of the skill and task content of occupations themselves is at least as important
as the employment shifts across occupations in accounting for aggregate changes in
skill and task use. Motivated by these patterns, we decompose changes in the earnings
distribution. We find that our new measures, which allow the task and skill content of
occupations to vary through time, can help explain a substantially greater proportion
of inequality than previous research has found. Changes in the task and skill content
of jobs account for a 17 percentage point increase in 90-10 male earnings inequality.
