Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: https://hdl.handle.net/10419/177024 
Year of Publication: 
2017
Series/Report no.: 
IZA Discussion Papers No. 11220
Publisher: 
Institute of Labor Economics (IZA), Bonn
Abstract: 
The debate about the impact of routine-biased technical change on wages revolves around the question whether occupational or overall wage distributions polarized. This paper instead argues that routine task prices should decline compared to abstract and manual task prices. I propose a new method, which exploits the sorting of workers into tasks and their associated wage growth in the Roy model, to estimate the changes in task prices under relatively weak assumptions. Empirical results for male workers in two U.S. datasets indicate that task prices polarized during the 1990s and 2000s. The estimates match the upper part of the wage distribution, and they are consistent with differences across countries and time periods in the lower part.
Subjects: 
task prices
Roy Model
routine-biased technical change
polarization
wage distribution
JEL: 
J23
J24
J31
Document Type: 
Working Paper

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