ESRI Seminar: "Differences in Job De-Routinization in OECD Countries: Evidence from the Programme for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies"

Speaker: Sara de la Rica, University of the Basque Country

Venue: ESRI, Whitaker Square, Sir John Rogerson’s Quay, Dublin 2

The aim of the paper is threefold. First, we compute differences in the degree of de-routinization of job content across a harmonized and hence comparable sample of Anglo-Saxon, many European and even Asian advanced countries. We do so by using very precise information on job content at the worker level, which allows for job task heterogeneity within occupations. Second we assess the extent to which computer adoption leads to the observed difference in the degree of de-routinization of job content. Third, we test whether higher degrees of technology adoption are associated with higher wage inequality. Our results show remarkable differences in the degree of de-routinization of job content across countries, with computer adoption at work a key significant driver of such differences. In particular, ICT use at work explains 13.4% (6.3%) of the cross-country unconditional (conditional) differences in deroutinization of job content.

Regarding the impact of adoption technology on wage inequality, our results indicate that although differences in ICT adoption explain an important and significant part of wage differentials, the effect is homogeneous for all the wage distribution, implying that we cannot find a significant association between wage inequality and technology adoption.

The discussion paper is available to download here.

Sara de la Rica

Sara de la Rica is a Full Professor of Economics at the University of the Basque Country (Spain). Her PhD is from the Department of Economics at the University of the Basque Country. Her research interests include Gender Economics, Immigration, Education and Labour Market Institutions.

She is co-editor of the IZA Journal of European Labour Studies. She was the President of The European Society of Population Economics (ESPE) (2012) and was secretary of ESPE since January 2005 until December 2010.

Her work has been published in Labour Economics, Journal of Population Economics, Economic Enquiry, Industrial and Labor Relations Review and Journal of Human Resources among others.